Innocent Spouse (18 page)

One Friday evening, I forgot myself and called a married friend to see if she wanted to talk or walk or go out for a drink. “Oh, Carol, I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m doing something with Harry.” She didn’t mean to be unkind, but it felt like a door slammed in my face. She hadn’t done anything wrong. In a couple-oriented society, her life was normal. It was mine that was not. I thought, “I used to be like that. I used to have that. I was a member of that club.” Honestly, I got angry. I told the psychiatrist about the episode. He asked me how I handled it.

“I politely said ‘Good-bye’ and then slammed down the phone and muttered, ‘Bitch.’ ”

“Good,” he said. “That’s a healthy sign.”

I
T WAS CRITICAL
that Nathans get a new lease from the five landlords, all of them members of the Halkias family and in their mid- to late seventies. They’d come to the funeral home for Howard’s visitation. A few weeks after that, Melina Halkias, who had the biggest share in the property, and her son joined me for coffee and cakes at Nathans. She wore black from head to toe, had a tissue tucked in her sleeve, and spoke halting English. Her son did most of the talking. It was clear they had deep concerns. Fear of my inexperience was now compounded by the tax fraud.

It was essential to keep them in the loop but also keep them pacified. “Call them every now and then, okay?” I asked Doug. “If you
could do that I’d be grateful. Just check in with them. I want them to know that everything is okay here.” Doug had a good relationship with the Halkias family, and I needed to keep them happy. For the moment, I needed them more than they needed me.

Attorney Jake Stein was negotiating the actual terms of the lease with the Halkias family’s lawyer, Dimitri Mallios. Howard first retained Jake in the 1980s when he learned that some busboys and a manager were dealing cocaine in the restaurant. The manager was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. Jake looked out for the interests of both Howard and Nathans then, and afterward Howard kept him involved in dealings with the landlords. These talks had been going on for some while, getting stalled periodically by my IRS issues and their own unrelated legal problems.

Meanwhile, I was faithfully paying the full rent each month. At one of several meetings in his office with Jake and me, Dimitri matter-of-factly said, “The family couldn’t care less about what kind of scrape Carol is in as long as she pays the rent. That’s all they care about.”

Howard loved to tell me how each time the lease was up he simply sent one of his cronies—a bookie who called himself “Nathan Detroit,” the very same bookie from whom Howard’s father bought the first share of Nathans—to meet with the oldest Halkias male, Theo. “I gave Nathan some feta cheese, a bottle or two of retsina, and a bag of money. By the end of the day I had a new lease.”

Was it true? I don’t know. I was learning that for Howard a good story often mattered more than the facts. Neither Howard nor his emissary was around to verify it in any case. But no matter the truth of Howard’s story—or the lack of it—I knew I had to play with a different and less colorful set of rules. There would be no retsina, no bags of money, not even a pound of feta from me. But I desperately needed the lease, because if the IRS did not grant me innocent spouse status, we might be able to negotiate a deal in which I paid the IRS not with my house but with the profit from selling Nathans. In order to sell Nathans, I needed a lease.

W
HEN YOU’RE THE
defendant in a federal tax fraud case, you don’t take or spend a dime without first calling your lawyers. The IRS has you by the short hairs. You are not sure what’s yours and what’s theirs. You call for permission on just about everything. Anxiety and sleepless nights become a way of life. Caravans of what-ifs crowd your private thoughts. And that’s when you’re innocent.

Miriam and Sheldon got us that one last summer at the house on the Bay, and I was grateful for that. I needed it, and Spencer especially needed it. I had to slowly bring him around to the notion that we would have to sell it and move. Even though “sentimental Carol” didn’t want to give up the house on the Bay, the emerging “rational Carol” knew it was inevitable. When Howard was alive, it was our happiest place to be as a family: boating, swimming, cooking, gardening, hanging out, having friends over, being alone together, enjoying our son and each other. At night we left the doors unlocked and the windows open, and I slept like a baby. I loved that we were at the end of a long dirt road, isolated, with no neighbors in view in any direction. Now at bedtime I locked the doors, closed the windows, and turned on the alarm. Even then, any little sound woke me. I never slept soundly. There was a lot of maintenance work to do. We entertained rarely. Most often it was just the two of us and the dog, trying our best to move on and be happy but living too sadly with memories of the past. It was time to sell. But there was a major uncertainty: The lawyers weren’t sure whether the money from the sale would go to Howard’s estate and therefore the government, or to Spencer and me.

Washington was sweltering in a heat wave, which comes as regularly in late August as the cherry blossoms do in April. Miriam and Sheldon asked me to come for a summit meeting at their offices. My
full army was at the table—lawyers, accountants, bookkeepers, and a lawyer friend who had volunteered to observe. Miriam started it off. She looked up from the stack of papers in front of her and smiled. “I have good news! The house is yours, Carol, not the estate’s. At the moment Howard died ownership reverted to you. Its called tenancy by the entirety. T-by-E. All the property and everything in it are yours.”

I wanted to jump up, spring over the table, throw my arms around her, and plant a big kiss on her cheek. But this was a law office, and propriety had to be maintained. So I lowered my head in thanks instead. The news was a big fat blast of sunshine.

“If you win innocent spouse status, you should be able to keep the proceeds from the sale. Everything else, everything in Howard’s name—stocks, bonds, bank accounts, savings, boats, cars, whatever else—belongs to the estate, and therefore the government.”

But. There’s always a “but.” I could feel it coming.

“But if you don’t win innocent spouse status, I don’t think you’ll get to keep any of it.”

I
CONTINUED LOOKING
for a house of our own, a house I could afford where Spencer and I would be happy. The sanest option was to stay in Georgetown because that’s where the restaurant was. I went there every day, and I needed to be close to it. If I had to get there in a hurry—for whatever reason—I wanted to be able to simply run down the street. In the evening I was a full-time mother, but if a friend or VIP showed up for dinner I wanted to get the call, wing over, say “hello and thanks,” and then run back home.

In 1997, the Georgetown real estate market was in a slump. Bargains were available. I wanted something manageable, affordable, and, if possible, charming. We poked around, with my agent, Jeanne Livingston, often asking, “But can you afford this?” The truth was I didn’t know what I could afford, because I didn’t know what I would have when the IRS was done with me, but I felt I had to go forward, as though somehow, someday, something would break our way. The good news from Miriam gave me hope.

Then one day I saw Frederica Valanos, whose son, Teddy, was the
same age as Spencer and attended the same school. Frederica was in a giddy mood. “Well, we closed on our new house,” she said.

“What do you mean, your new house?” I asked.

“We bought a house a block away and it’s great.”

“What about your old house?”

“We’re putting it on the market this weekend.”

Without hesitation I said, “I want it. Don’t sell it to anybody else.”

I knew the house. It was a modest yellow brick townhouse with a big bay window that overlooked the street. I’d been there a few times, dropping off Spencer for playdates or to visit Frederica and her husband, George. It was the right size for the two of us—two bedrooms and a small patch of grass in the back. I already loved it.

“Can you do it, with the IRS and all?” Frederica asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

During the next seventy-two hours, Jeanne Livingston gave me a crash course in how to buy a house. A mortgage broker did a credit check and the results shocked me. “You have perfect credit,” he said. “This will be easy.”

“How can I have perfect credit?”

“Your credit cards have always been paid on time. You have no loans or debts. You’re clean as a whistle. You have the highest score they give.”

In another ten years my credit rating would be the lowest score they give, but at the time you could have knocked me over with a feather.

Jeanne asked when I wanted to close.

“Before I do anything else I have to talk to my tax lawyers and find out if I can even dream about this,” I said.

I faxed a letter to Sheldon and Miriam basically asking for their permission to buy a house, which was really asking them to ask the IRS for permission to buy a house. Of course it was complicated. What I needed to know was whether I could use money from the estate account, or from Howard’s stocks and bonds, to make a down payment—money I would repay when I sold the Bay house (and hoping the government ruled my way on innocent spouse).

It was a gamble. We knew the worst-case scenario was that the IRS would get everything. If I bought the house, “everything” would
include it, too. Later that day, driving out to a mall in Virginia for lunch with an old friend of Howard’s and Spencer and the live-in babysitter, Patricia, my cell phone rang. It was Sheldon and Miriam. “We’ve reviewed your letter. Can we go over it?”

“Yes,” I said. They were on speakerphone. We all listened.

“We don’t think you can use the estate money,” they said. “Can Nathans make you a loan?”

“Nathans doesn’t have any money,” I said. “The estate is the only money I have access to.”

They said they would consult an estate law expert and get back to me. “But you may not be able to do this. It could put you in violation of the IRS.” My heart sank.

I hung up. We continued driving to the mall. Patricia sat beside me up front. Spencer was in the backseat, talking, as he often did, about
Star Wars
. I tried to keep up with his lively chatter, but I couldn’t concentrate. Tears welled in my eyes.

“Guys, I need a minute,” I said.

“You cry if you want to,” Patricia said.

“Don’t cry! Don’t cry!” Spencer shouted from the backseat.

Patricia turned to him. “If your mom wants to cry she has every right to cry, Spencer.”

So I cried. It seemed everywhere I turned, everything I did to try to put our lives in order got stopped by the words “in violation of.” There was always something I might be in violation of. It made me feel that at any moment I’d be hauled before a judge like an outlaw.

“Are you still crying?” Spencer asked.

“I’m trying to pull it together. I’ll be okay in a minute, Spencer. Just remember how you cried when you watched
Mars Attacks
and how the Martians scared you,” I said.

“Yeah,” came from the backseat.

“Well, that’s how I feel right now. Just as scared. Like Martians are after me.”

“Are we going to be poor?” he asked.

“Poor? Maybe not flat-out poor, but certainly poorer. But we’ll be okay. We can get through this. We can do it together.”

At lunch, Howard’s old friend wanted to share his admiring memories,
but I wasn’t feeling in a very benevolent mood toward Howard at that moment. I wanted him to come back to life and walk in my shoes for a day, to find out what it was like to be stuck in the mess he’d left us.

The restaurant had a jungle motif to wow the children. Spencer was enchanted. With all the noise, though, I could barely hear my cell phone ringing. It was Miriam. “Let me get to a quieter spot where I can hear you,” I shouted over the din. The crowded mall was as noisy as a football stadium after a touchdown.

I searched frantically for some quiet space. Finally, I spied a janitor’s closet. I darted in and shut the door.

“Hi,” I said. “I can hear now.” I straddled a wash bucket and leaned against a rack of brooms.

“I have good news! You will be able to use the estate money because ultimately it was supposed to be yours.”

“We know that will never happen,” I said.

“Right,” she said, “but when you get the proceeds from the sale of your home that money will go into escrow to pay back the estate. I wouldn’t put too much money into the house, though, because it might at some point have IRS exposure.”

Exposure
. That was another word I hated, and in my case it got used a lot.
Exposure
meant my assets were hanging out there and the G-men could grab them any time. Exposure was something a person in my position did not want to have, but, as my generation learned from the Rolling Stones, you can’t always get what you want.

“The bottom line is you can get your house!” she said, emphatically. Even though I had learned to protect myself from sudden happy highs, I gave in on this one. My heart filled with relief, joy, and wonder. The wonder was that something positive could happen in the midst of so much negative. I emerged from the janitor’s closet like Superman from his phone booth. I raced into the restaurant to tell Spencer, “We’re gonna get Teddy’s house!” He lit up like I
was
Superman.

During the drive back to Washington I called Jeanne Livingston and told her the good news. “It’s a green light,” I said. “Let’s get that house.” From the backseat Spencer trilled about what he would do with “Teddy’s room.” His joy was the best possible part of the day. I didn’t know how he would react to the news of our moving. I honestly didn’t know how much he understood of what I was saying. But
he was excited and happy and that’s what I needed. I wanted him, in his own little-boy way, to be caught up in the idea of not looking back but moving forward.

Negotiations stalled on the issue of price, which I thought we’d agreed to on the back porch only days earlier. Suddenly George Valanos became a hard bargainer. I learned no deal is a deal until it’s a deal. We finally came to an agreement, at a price only a fraction higher than what he told me he was looking for. Later Jeanne Livingston said she had a message for me from George. “He said he was sorry he pushed so hard. He forgot it was not a commercial deal.”