Innocent Spouse (25 page)

“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.

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 life, 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.

Susy, at the time a top official at the Commerce Department, was away on a trip. Spencer was tucked in. It poured heavy rain outside as Terry and I ate dinner, drank wine, and talked. I let it all out about the tax fraud, the illicit write-offs, and the money Howard had taken from Nathans. “It’s hard to accept how this happened,” I said. Then I brought up another matter, one I’d discussed with nobody but Martha. “There are rumors going around that Howard committed suicide.”

Terry was taken aback. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

“No, I don’t, but Martha wonders. She wonders about it a lot. She thinks he might have considered it his only way out. She can’t understand why he didn’t go to the doctor.… He didn’t have to die. Maybe if I’d been here instead of New York …”

“Carol, he was a grown-up. You did all you could do. He was very ill, possibly—obviously—not in his right mind. He might have been too sick to recognize how sick he was.”

“He might have gone to jail, Terry. He couldn’t face that.”

Terry was silent.

“If Howard had gone to trial and then to jail on top of the IRS taking every single thing we owned … well, I can’t imagine. I simply can’t imagine. Can you?”

“No,” Terry said.

“Even if he didn’t go to jail, the IRS would have taken everything they could get their hands on. He would have been mortified. No, that’s too weak a word.…” I was beginning to think Martha had a point—not that Howard had actively killed himself but that he just let himself die because he saw no alternative. On the other hand, Terry knew Howard was smart enough that he could have figured it out. “He wouldn’t have rolled over,” Terry said. “There’s no way he would have abandoned Spencer. None.”

I believed Terry was right, but how well can we ever know another person, I thought. How well do we know ourselves?

S
PENCER’S FIRST WEEKS
of school went well. He loved kindergarten. He loved his backpack with the multiple key chains hanging down. He wore it proudly as he marched out the door to wait on the street for the school bus, with me and Teddy the dog in tow. He came home with elaborate stories about teachers and friends and antics on the playground. He regularly brought home artwork, including a family portrait of stick figures with names below them: “Mommy,” “Daddy” (with a halo and wings), “Teddy,” and “Cecilia.”

Cecilia? “Who’s Cecilia?” I asked. “Does she live in your room with you? Is she invisible to me?”

He didn’t reply.

Later, at a parent-teacher conference, his teacher said to me, “You didn’t tell us about your daughter. That was a surprise.”

We were seated across from each other on pint-size chairs at a pint-size table. “My daughter? I don’t have a daughter.”

“Cecilia?” Instantly I understood Spencer’s “family” drawing.

“Spencer told the class about his sister, Cecilia, and that she’s away at boarding school.”

“There is no sister. Cecilia’s the product of his very active imagination.” I laughed, but I was concerned.

When I mentioned Cecilia to his grief therapist, Ellen Sanford, she said not to worry. “He’s just trying to make your family like the families of other kids in his class. Don’t be surprised by that. Again, he just wants to fit in. He wants desperately to be like the other children.”

She asked if Spencer was aware of the death of Princess Diana, if he’d seen any of the funeral coverage on television.

“Yes, we talked about it. I asked him what he would say to William and Harry. He said, ‘I would tell them I miss my daddy a lot and that it’s okay to cry.’ ”

As much as I tried to be there for him during his at-home hours, my record wasn’t perfect. I almost always got home in time to meet the afternoon school bus, but one day in the first months of school (the babysitter was off-duty) I was late. I was walking down the street toward the waiting bus just as it pulled away. The driver wouldn’t leave children at the bus stop unless someone was waiting for them.

“Stop!” I screamed. “Stop!” I yelled to pedestrians closer to the bus, “Don’t let that bus go!” I was running as fast as I could in a straight skirt and heels. I cut through some office buildings to try to catch the bus one street over, but it picked up speed and I could not keep up. All I could think about was my little boy on that bus wondering what had happened to his mother. At almost six years old he certainly wasn’t thinking that I had been delayed and was likely chasing the bus in four-inch heels.

I ran home, grabbed the car keys, and bolted for the car. I called the school to tell them I was on my way. My heart pounded. My poor boy. What must he be thinking? How sad must he be? I beat the bus to school by one minute. When it pulled up the driver opened the doors and Spencer stepped down, head hung low, eyes moist, dragging his backpack and holding a piece of artwork in his hand. He wore the saddest expression. “It’s going to be okay now,” the driver assured him in his lilting Jamaican accent. “Here’s your mum.”

Spencer didn’t say a word. He fell into my arms, pressed his face into my side, and stayed like that. I rubbed the back of his head and kissed him. “Mommy’s here. I’m so sorry, angel. I love you so much and never meant for that to happen. I ran after the bus as fast as I could but you guys were too quick for me.”

I stepped back and knelt down so I could see his face. He didn’t smile.

“Is it going to be okay?” I asked, holding his arms in my hands. Spencer nodded. “Why don’t you take me into school and show me around? I bet there are all kinds of new things to see.”

“Okay,” he said, taking my hand. “I’ll show you the science department where the animals live. We have lots of animals.”

“Can I tell you something for the future?” I said. “If this ever happens again, if the bus stops and I’m not there to meet you—and I hope that will never happen again—but if it does, please remember to do this: Look out the back window to see if I’m running after you!”

“Okay, Mom, but you better stay in shape so you can catch it next time.”

E
VEN THOUGH
I didn’t know when I would fire Doug Moran, I knew I would do it. The place needed a strong manager and unity at the top. Doug was not a good manager, and the top was more fractured than unified. But how to fill the job? And how to teach the new guy how we do business at Nathans? Maybe better to say how we’d
like
to do business at Nathans. That’s when it occurred to me to bring in a future manager first as an efficiency consultant to look the place over thoroughly, stick his nose into everything, and learn how everything works and who does what. He would give me a report on what’s done right, what’s done wrong, and how it could be fixed. I patted myself on the back for that one. I patted Connie the bookkeeper on the back when she said, “I know just the man. Vito Zappala.”

He’d owned a restaurant that had failed, which concerned me, but Connie said, “It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t his fault.” Hmmm. Nothing about the restaurant business made sense to me, so why should I treat this bit of news as unusual? “It didn’t work out but he’s good and you’ll like him. He’s a grown-up.” Where is he now? I wondered. “Works in the golf business, but he’s tired of that. Wants to get back to restaurants.”

Vito and I met not at Nathans but at another restaurant. Connie was right—I liked him. Not only did he have the lyrical name of Vito Zappala, but he looked like a Vito Zappala. He sounded New York and looked as Italian as a bowl of spaghetti carbonara. He was in his fifties, not tall, not short, not thin, not fat, dark haired, bearded, walked with a slight limp, wore a nice suit. He was in the midst of a divorce and had a daughter the same age as Spencer. He was extremely forthcoming about the ways he felt he could help me run Nathans. He understood that when the day arrived to fire Doug he would have to step in
quickly and keep the business from crashing—and with no guarantee going forward that the IRS would even let the place stay open.

Vito showed up toward the end of October. He rolled up his sleeves and immediately involved himself in every part of the workings of the restaurant. The staff perked up and worked like professionals. Even Doug answered questions, opened files, showed up on time, and was agreeable and helpful. For a moment I felt guilty. Was I wrong about Doug? But then I realized Doug was behaving toward Vito the way he should have behaved toward me. I mentioned it to Vito. “Oh, it’s simple,” he said. “For one thing, I’m a man. For another, I’m not you.”

I got out of the way and busied myself with the pursuit of a chef. We’d been using line cooks. They did an adequate job, but I thought a real chef would send a message to the community that Nathans, which had been foundering even before Howard died, was back in the game. The bar seemed to take care of itself. It wasn’t broken, so there was nothing to fix. But the restaurant was another story, and food was an area where I could make a difference. I could put my stamp on the place with the food. During one of our midnight calls, I told Paolo that I was going to hire a chef. Paolo thought I was nuts. He believed I could run the kitchen just fine with a strong team of line cooks,
strong
being the important word. I heard the same thing a few evenings later over dinner with my dear friends Patrick O’Connell and Rinehardt Lynch, who had created The Inn at Little Washington in rural northern Virginia. My idea of hiring a chef drew guffaws. “They’re all nuts,” Rinehardt said.

Patrick, a renowned chef himself, agreed. “We are.” The three of us broke into laughter.

What Paolo, Patrick, and Rinehardt couldn’t grasp is why I wanted a chef: If I had to be in this business, I wanted a creative collaborator, someone to help make the ordeal more interesting, possibly even fun for me, even though I could hear Fred Thimm saying I was a long way from the “fun” stage.

T
HE PROCESS OF
interviewing chefs was an eye-opener. A well-dressed middle-aged man came in with a thick book of clippings—all
from high-end French restaurants. “You understand this is mostly a saloon?” I said.

“Oh, maybe it won’t work, then.” He closed his book and departed.

A young navy cook showed up, brimming with ambition and enthusiasm. “What are your specialties?” I asked.

“I can cook spaghetti,” he said.

“And, what else?”

“Well, I can cook all kinds of spaghetti.”

There was another young man I liked a lot. He had notable credentials in New American cuisine and listed some hot restaurants on his résumé. But there were so many of them. He was like a frog—hop, hop, hop. I called a restaurant owner friend who was—remarkably—on his list of references. I say
remarkably
because the owner had three words: “He’s a drunk.”