A Complicated Marriage (49 page)

And then he was home. The only memento was the intrusion of an oxygen compressor with long tubes to be used before bed and “as needed,” and a tall green cylinder of oxygen for emergencies. It stood like an ominous sentinel in the corner of the bedroom, a reminder that all was not as before. The first night home, instead of his usual book and a cigarette, he sat on the edge of the bed, breathing the oxygen, his hands folded. He said he just wanted “to savor feeling better.” He remarked on how “feeble” he felt, a new word that would come up often, and how he blamed the smoking and drinking. Sounding like a repentant gangster in a thirties movie, he said, “I thought I could play fast and loose with my body.”
In turn, I gratefully seized those thoughts. They meant we would be on the same team. I reminded him of his favorite Bee Gees song, “Stayin' Alive.” We could do it.

During those posthospital weeks, we continued to do a lot of talking. He was dreaming a lot. Particularly vivid were the ones of Sol, his middle brother, whom he always referred to as the “good son,” the one who had given the most and gotten the least. He had contracted polio as a child, and it had affected the use of his right arm. Clem had always berated himself for not protecting Sol from his father's dismissive treatment of him as the “damaged” son. Sol had died in 1987 of lung cancer, “the first to go.”

And we were doing a lot of hugging. We had always been huggers, but these were long, clinging hugs. Another first: I felt needed by Clem. Not just as the passive “presence” he had always loved in his life, nor as the current slavey of health and hearth, but with an urgency, as a hands-on presence.

Surprisingly soon, the familiar reasserted itself. No more medications, except for the “as needed” oxygen and the inhaler, albuterol, for episodes of shortness of breath. We both puffed away on our inhalers—I was now on two that I used daily—as we picked up our routines. For Clem, that meant smoking and drinking. I went to more Al-Anon meetings in hopes of controlling my outbursts of anger, which increasingly fractured my focus on my own life. Every day I stumbled over the Step One tenet that I was “helpless over alcoholism.” As many times as I said it, my subtext was
Yes, but . . . Maybe if I
. . . And I kept going back to meetings. After all, I was smart, I could learn, and I was motivated. Things had to get better, didn't they?

Late morning on March 29, I was at my desk, trying yet again to breathe fire into the tepid dialogue of Steve's interrogation by the Norwich police, straining to hear the voices and let them lead me to their truth on the page. The phone rang. I picked it up, grateful for a respite. And our lives changed.

A woman's voice. “Janice Greenberg?” The name Janice always set off my official-business alarm. “The District Attorney's office.” “Arrested.” “James Powers.” “Fraud.” I heard her, but I absorbed little. “No, that's
impossible. There must be some mistake.” I said all the things people say when something is unthinkable. Besides, her voice was too young, too innocent, to deliver such a dark message.
Who is this girl who goes on and on
? But my body heard. The blood boiled in my head; my skin quaked with cold. Slowly I pieced together what I didn't want to hear: The funds we had given 555 to invest two years earlier were gone. We had been embezzled. Sarah had been victimized as well. We were to meet with the “girl,” an assistant DA, the next morning.

Within seconds I had my folder of monthly statements from Powers, the lists of investments, so orderly: numbers, percentages, totals, and profits, not too big, not too small. Fake, all of them. A fantasy contrived to satisfy a gullible victim by a vicious con man with an oily, optimistic veneer. No, it couldn't be. Trembling, I called one of the companies listed on the statement, then another. Dead ends. I had no proof of ownership; they had no record of my name or of Powers. Finally, one company tentatively acknowledged my name and asked for my mother's maiden name. She said the name “Norden” was incorrect. I screamed at her; she disconnected.

My body was still shaking, but I could feel the iciness of shock start to subside. And I could focus. It had taken such a short time, maybe half an hour, for the truth to sink in. The money was gone. The money from the last painting we had given to Emmerich to sell, the profit from my apartment sale. We had found ourselves with more money than we had ever had at one time, and I had thought it was time we invested it, tried to hold on to it. Instead, all of it was gone. I had been mugged once on a dark street in the West Village. It was like that. Quick. One minute you have something, the next minute, nothing. I turned off the computer and called Sarah. She had already heard. She was angry, so angry. Drawing resolve from her anger, I told her that I couldn't just sit there, that I was heading down to Powers's office. I had to see for myself.

At the Graybar building at Lexington and Forty-second Street, I ran through the labyrinthine corridors to his office, two rooms, seedy and dark. His assistant, Joanne, his only employee, was there. I was taken aback; she was the knowledgeable one, the competent one whom I had been dealing with by phone for two years. Why wasn't she in jail? I kept
saying that I wanted my papers, my records. She was a wall. In an alcove I saw file cabinets and started pulling out drawers, files, but I was too hysterical to know where to look.

I went into Powers's office. I had been there only once, early on. A room that, with its low-overhead prudence, must have impressed me, but that now revealed itself for what it was: pathetic, shabby, with grimy windows that faced an air shaft. I searched his battered desk—nothing. I stared at his chair and saw him sitting there, a pudgy, middle-aged mama's boy, his face shiny as egg whites, with a languid confidence, not too much confidence, not too little. Oh, he knew the value of staying in the invisible gray middle ground. Had I liked him? Not really. But then, I didn't think I needed to. Trusted him? I must have. I had heard about him from my old theater buddy Jim Leverett, who had invested with him for a long time and had always had good results. Thinking it had been time to have someone smarter than I was handle our money, I had asked Jim to put me in touch with him. My fault. All my fault. There was a list of numbers on the phone. I dialed them. A car service, a dry cleaner, nothing. A fat man in a uniform came through the door. As he came toward me, he said if I didn't leave he'd call the cops. I pushed past him, yelling at Joanne, “Why aren't you in jail?”

Downstairs I went into Chase Bank, where I supposedly had an account, and was amazed to find that I actually did, if only in the amount of $21.47. I told the teller to close the account. She said she couldn't do that without the cosigner's signature. Guess who. I asked for the manager. All I could say was, “I want my money.” Louder and louder. He gave me the money. Did I imagine that it might be the only money we would ever recover? No. My brain had not yet dared to venture into the future.

The cab ride home seemed to take hours. I was bent double with shame, guilt. The incessant reel in my head that would replay for months had begun.
How could I have ever . . . ? Why did I not see . . . ? Did I honestly think he
. . . ?

With Clem, at last the tears and fears spilled over. He was calm. He was more dismayed by my reaction than by what had happened. Yes, Powers was a thief. Yes, he was a scumbag. “But it's only money,” Clem said. His clarity and detachment soothed yet dismayed me. Would I have
to fight alone? I needed a warrior. Yet Clem made me feel safe, loved. Later, Sarah came over. She brought her pragmatism, her strength. As always, I listened to her and would learn from her.

The next day Sarah and I went through our first metal detector and went upstairs to wait in the corridors of the ADA's offices. Grim, musty, a place of function, a place that smelled of troubled, anxious people. The halls of justice may not have been stately, but they quieted me. I belonged there. I wouldn't mind working there. After all, I would need a job. No, I was too old, too damaged.

A young woman in a black dress—all the women wore skirts—stormed by, a soldier carrying an armload of files, her heels hammering on the worn wood floor. Mid-stride she stopped, turned, and approached us. This was Valerie Arvin. In her cubicle she filled us in on what we could expect. Powers would be arraigned, perhaps that day, and would undoubtedly plead not guilty. In ten days or so we would testify at a grand-jury hearing. If all proceeded as planned, indictment would follow and he would be sent to Rikers Island to await trial. There were ten victims and multiple counts of grand larceny. We heard the phrase
Ponzi scheme
for the first time. I laughed. Such a silly word. Sounded more like a kid's game than a devastating crime. Valerie said these cases took time to sort through and the felon usually pled out. That was all about him. What about us? Would we get any money back? Where did the money go? Wasn't there anything we could do? She shuffled papers, hedged. Money trails were hard to track. Her job was to gather evidence to prosecute Powers. As for restitution, well . . . That day there were no answers. Maybe a glimmer of justice, but no answers.

There was little time to assimilate what had happened, to weigh the effect, and certainly there was no time to heal. Each day I hit the ground scurrying for solutions. The absurdity of that was soon clear, as the ramifications of the damage spread. My accountant told me that no taxes had been filed for us by Powers in the last two years. Yes, I had even turned over the preparation of our taxes to him. Sarah had as well. Again the waves of shame and guilt, the stupidity. I was told it was only a matter of time before the IRS would impose liens on what we had left: about $8,000 at Merrill Lynch and $3,000 at Chemical Bank. The accountant
would try to intercede on our behalf, but until Powers was indicted, until the DA's office supplied paperwork . . . All a catch-22. Soon I wasn't scurrying for solutions, only Band-Aids. What could we hock or sell? How soon could I sell my office, Sarah her condo?

As Valerie had outlined, Powers was arraigned, denied bail, and sent to Rikers. So far, so good. Let him fester, rot in hell. But part of me was envious. No scurrying for him. His job was done. Ours had just begun. Within a week the victims of Powers found each other and met for the first time around my accountant's opulent conference table. There were indeed ten of us, plus a few spouses and relatives. Not, of course, Clem. He had really meant it that day before we were married when he had handed me the checkbook and stepped back from all things financial. Sarah and I knew only our friend Jim Leverett.

We were all in various stages of shock, anger, and disbelief. Quickly, we had a leader, the senior alpha male of the group. The agenda was clear: track the money trail, recoup what we could, put the bastard away for life. Short term, hire a lawyer and a private investigator. We agreed to share all information and work as a team. Then we each told our story. Most of us were theater connected: actors, directors, writers; one of us was a star, and, who would've thought, one of us was a producer for
Law and Order
. Sarah and I were the most recent suckers to be caught in the web, while some had been with Powers for many years, even decades, and had welcomed him into their homes. The amounts of loss ranged from the low six figures to $1 million–plus. Jointly, Sarah and I were in the low to mid-range. But the bottom line was that we had all lost everything.
Everything
was a great equalizer. Some had jobs, some didn't. We all had some assets at hand. We agreed to meet regularly, and, on a lighter note, before we disbanded we dubbed ourselves the VIPs, Victims of Powers. At that first meeting, the group galvanized me. I finally opened up to my anger. I may have been victimized, but, thanks to the solidarity, I knew I could be strong.

Two weeks later, we all testified at the grand-jury hearing. Before we made our appearance, we had a private meeting with District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. The legendary DA was open and informal, well apprised of the devastating nature of the crime, and listened to our
concerns about full disclosure between the ADA and our group. Overall, more form than content, but it did make us feel that our case was special and that at least the guy at the top was watching.

For the actress in me, the witness chair at the hearing was a stage I didn't want to be on. The questions were straightforward, but my voice was a foggy quaver. It wasn't that I didn't know the answers; it was just that in some way I felt that I was the one on trial and I had better get the answers right, or else. Worse, when the jury started asking questions, it hit me:
My God, what if they don't believe me? Powers could walk out a free man
.

I needn't have worried. He was indicted on thirty counts of grand larceny and held over for trial. As a result of the meeting with Morgenthau and the hearing, the media woke up to us. I cringed. I was afraid of being judged, of being thought incomprehensibly stupid. But again, I needn't have worried. Unlike some of the others in our group, Sarah and I were hardly Page Six material, as a few of the others were, and in the small piece the
Times
ran, we were an afterthought: “ . . . and a woman and her daughter.”

I had lost money and I had also lost trust. I viewed people as the enemy and clung to my safe places: home with Clem and Sarah, Al-Anon, my closest friends—those who listened and cared, not those who spouted outrage and advice—and crowds. I was on a jammed Lexington Avenue subway coming home from the grand-jury hearing when I first noticed that sitting there flesh to flesh between strangers, I felt peaceful, almost euphoric. I was just me. Nothing expected of me. I breathed my air, took up my space. My secrets my own.

At every VIP meeting new accounts of damage poured onto the table: property taxes not paid, IRAs liquidated, documents forged, even a voice impersonated to gain access to private assets. We were sure there had to have been collusion at Chase, Powers's bank, where he had opened the token accounts in our names and through which he kited checks. But who would take on that behemoth? We were impatient with the DA's office. Why thirty counts? Why not fifty, a hundred? And always the driving question: What had Powers done with the money? We each coughed up $2,000 to hire a lawyer and PI. We needed input from some
pros. We knew the process would be long and tedious, but some action was better than none. Like all Ponzi schemes, Powers's had imploded. The market had gone down, clients had withdrawn funds rather than “invested,” and the river had run dry. On March 29, one investor had wanted to cash out, hit a wall, and called the cops. Child's play, all a game. But wreaking such havoc.