Innocent Spouse (12 page)

One night Martha and I were in the kitchen having a glass of wine before dinner. I’d just tucked in and given a kiss good night to Spencer. Suddenly I spontaneously blurted out that Howard had hit me. More than once. I leaned against the kitchen counter and looked down at her, sitting at the table, expecting to see her jaw drop.

But, no. She didn’t appear surprised. Instead, looking down at the floor, she said, “It happened before.”

My
jaw dropped. I stopped what I was doing and sat down. “No! You’re kidding!” I couldn’t tell if Martha did or didn’t want to talk about it, but I had to know. I needed her to help me bring this stranger, this intimate stranger I’d lived with for twenty years and once thought I knew, into focus. Howard was like an iceberg. The dangerous part was beneath the surface. That was the dark part I had glimpsed only in alcohol-fed rages. But I was not going to be the
Titanic
.

There were bits and pieces he had told me along the way, about feeling alienated from his parents, about fearing his mother’s wrath, but weren’t these normal feelings of a child toward a parent? I know he felt he had never lived up to his father’s expectations, that he was told he was a disappointment—and often made the disappointments
possible, getting kicked out of boarding school and then college for a range of shenanigans, including drinking. There was a lot of in and out of therapy, at his parents’ insistence, but he had said, “I just sat there and said nothing until the session was over. It was pointless. I hated that they made me go.” His self-esteem was low but he masked it so well—with the clothes, the posture, the good manners, the wit. Until, of course, the deep rage bubbled up to the surface. I needed Martha to tell me what had happened before.

“It will only help me understand him better,” I said. “It won’t make me love him less.” She told me there had been “incidents” with the wife before me. “I don’t know a lot, but I know in one case she ended up in the hospital. There was a split and talk of divorce but it didn’t happen. They patched it up.” She made a bitter face that told me she didn’t want to go any further—like discussing Howard’s tax fraud.

“I almost called the police once,” I said. “I picked up the phone, started to dial, but couldn’t go through with it. He stood there practically daring me, and then I hung up. It was my weakest moment.” I always thought I could turn it around, that the next day would be better, that when he sobered up he’d see my reason and get help, get fixed, get something. And eventually, he did.

“Well, if it’s any comfort to you,” I said, “when he got on Prozac his rages stopped. It calmed whatever needed to be calmed. It was a total turnaround.”

Martha’s revelation meant I wasn’t to blame for Howard’s outbursts. It was him, not me. I know that’s what the books say, and it’s what my psychiatrist told me, too, but learning that I wasn’t alone, that he’d hit another woman who was close to him, a woman he must once have loved, the mother of two of his children—that took away some of the shimmer and gloss I had given the man. Slowly a more realistic portrait was beginning to emerge.

Every time we got together Martha asked, “So, what’s the latest on Nathans?”

“As we sit here I’ve got spotters at the bar. I hate to do it but all the big boys tell me I have to track the theft. It’s always going on but apparently, just as Howard had often said, there are acceptable levels and unacceptable levels.” At that moment I didn’t appreciate the irony.

I should have had spotters trained on Howard. “I’ve got a lot to learn,” I said to Martha.

Customers I trusted told me that Bob Walker, the night manager, was knocking back the Grand Marnier on the job and often appeared drunk by the end of his shift. He had a wife and children, and he drove home every night. “I don’t mean to sound like a nanny but I worry that he’s on the road like that.”

“What does Doug say?” Martha asked.

“ ‘Not my problem.’ That’s what he says.”

I told Martha that I needed to hire my own bookkeeper to get the books together—a straight set of books, because “Howard kept two sets and I don’t know if the one I’ve got is the straight one or the crooked one.” We laughed about that. But the laughter was thin. In fact, there was nothing funny about it.

Invariably Martha would ask, “What
was
he thinking?” I had no answer to that. She also said, “You’ll make mistakes. You know you’ll make mistakes. But you’ll figure it out and pull through.”

At my age, a few years shy of fifty, I was experienced enough to avoid the big blunders, and if I did mess up I recovered quickly and smartly—but that was in journalism, the profession I understood. In the restaurant business I wasn’t sure I’d recognize a mistake until it hit me in the face, or the backside. There were no tutorials. I asked myself, What would Howard do?—a foolish question. All I had to do was look at what Howard had done to see how foolish the question really was. The ruins were all around me.

S
LOWLY
I
GOT
settled in at Nathans. While the office, and what went on in the office, confused me, there was a greater comfort level with the dining room and the kitchen. If I brought any restaurant expertise to the business it was that for twenty years Howard and I had dined out at the best restaurants in the world, and by exposure I had developed a sophisticated palate and an appreciation for a wide range of foods—from the street to the highest end. I could talk the talk. Also, we had eaten at Nathans occasionally and I liked the food. After a few months I felt comfortable getting more involved.

I met with the kitchen staff in the empty dining room between shifts, our chairs in a circle. Apart from the senior cook, Lore, no one spoke English. I talked. They nodded. A lot of smiling and nodding. Lore translated from English to Spanish. I spoke effusively about my appreciation of their work, my love of restaurants, and my vision of Nathans’ role in the community, and asked if they had questions about my thoughts on food, the menu, or how I wanted the kitchen to operate. They nodded and smiled. There was only one question. Lore translated: “Do we keep our jobs?

Doug seemed reluctant to help me understand how Nathans worked so I went for a tutorial to Fred Thimm, president of the hugely successful Palm restaurant chain. It had started small in New York and grew to a megamillion-dollar corporation on a winning formula of huge servings of steak and potatoes with the occasional supersized lobster. Nobody messed with the formula. The headquarters were now in Washington. Fred and I sat across from each other in puffy leather chairs in the company’s conference room, Nathans’ financials spread out before us. He looked through the profit-and-loss spreadsheets and copies of the “daily sheet,” which showed a more specific breakdown of day-to-day business. “This doesn’t even tell you how many covers you did! How do you find that out?”

I didn’t know what a “cover” was.

“It means the number of tables served,” he said. “You need more information. What’s on this spreadsheet just makes the job easier for the guy counting the money. Do you know what it costs to open each day? Has anybody told you that?”

I shook my head.

“I wonder if anybody knows,” he said. I was beginning to feel woefully stupid.

“Well, you’ve got to find that out. You’ve got to know what you’re paying for rent, for food, for payroll, wine and liquor, taxes, all of that. That has to be inside your head. You have to know the numbers and understand them.” I didn’t tell him that I’d flunked high school math.

“Right now, these numbers look to me like you have some days where you’re just working for your staff and the landlords. You open up for the courtesy of paying employees and vendors, but not yourself.

You’ve got a lot of tightening up to do. Your rent is outrageous but there’s probably nothing you can do about that. Your payroll is way high. I can’t believe Doug is getting one percent of the gross. Where did that come from?”

Fred talked rapidly, forcefully, and confidently. He was a regular businessman who just happened to have the looks of Jon Bon Jovi, if Bon Jovi wore a pin-striped suit.

“Do you get along with Doug? I bet you don’t. I bet in his head he’s the only one who knows how to do it and he hates having you there.”

“Fred, I’ve looked around the restaurant and I see places where I can make a difference. I want to get it painted. I’m going to buff up the back room. We need more fresh flowers.”

Fred sighed and shook his head. “You don’t get it, Carol. That’s the fun stuff. Your place is in critical condition. You don’t have time for the fun stuff.” He grabbed a piece of paper. “This is what you have to do.” He leaned over the conference table, writing quickly. When he finished, he took the piece of paper and turned it toward me. On it he’d written:

1. A new lease
   .
   
2. A bookkeeper (Are you making or losing money?)
   .
   
3. Settle with the IRS
   .
   
4. A strong general manager
   .
   
5. Rebuild Nathans—its brand, its image
   .
   
6. Sell it, or learn to enjoy it
   .
   

“You think I can do all this?” I asked.

He pulled one of the chairs closer and sat next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder. It was a friendly, almost brotherly gesture.

“I know you can. You’re smart enough and strong enough. But you have to stop being a victim and a martyr and start being a survivor and a winner. Carol, you’re in denial and you’ve got to get over it. This is your problem. It’s your problem and nobody else is going to fix it for you. Only you.”

———

A
FTER MEETING WITH
Fred, I picked up Spencer at school, took him home to the babysitter, returned to Nathans’ basement office, and made some calls to
Larry King Live
. Then I asked Doug Moran to join me in the quiet back dining room, which was empty in the lull between lunch and dinner. His mop of blond hair was still wet. He’d just returned from the health club. We sat at a round table by the windows. Bright afternoon sunlight was streaming through the glass. The spring weather was beautiful. The sidewalk outside was bustling with shoppers, tourists, students.

“We have to find a way to work together,” I said. “It’s not good for the staff to feel we’re at odds.”

“It’s hard for me not having Howard here,” Doug confessed. No matter what their disagreements, they had been a team.

“It’s hard for me, too, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“I worry that you don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “And I worry you’ll go up to New York and meet someone and get married and he’ll take my job.”

I was flabbergasted. “Doug, the only husband I want is the one I just buried! I’m trying to do the best I can here. My entire focus is on Spencer, Nathans, the IRS, and
Larry King Live
. That’s all. I have no room in my life for anything else.”

“Are you going to lose the business?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not. I have new lawyers and I’m hoping for the best.”

“Well, I know you can’t run this place without me,” Doug said. “If I’d died instead of Howard, Nathans would be closed already.”

“Yes, Doug, you’ve told me that before.”

“T
HIS IS HOW
we think Howard was working out the math,” Miriam Fisher said. She, Sheldon, and I were sitting in their conference room as she explained the details of Howard’s tax crimes. Thick legal binders were stacked on the table. It had been almost six months since Howard died. My new lawyers were now read up on the case. I trusted them. I liked them.

Everything circled back to Howard and his father. Mr. Joynt was involved in the restaurant from the moment in 1969 when he decided to buy it for his son. He bought out the founding partners and negotiated a lease with the landlords’ lawyer, Dimitri Mallios. It wasn’t a very good tenant lease. It heavily favored the Halkias family, who owned the building. Howard had agreed to pay property taxes, insurance, and upkeep for the entire building. He had waived any number of rights. He couldn’t assign the lease without the permission of the landlords, and the lease set a very high base rent for the time—according to real estate experts, the highest per square foot in the city. It was a fabulous location but the rent was unrealistic for a 2,500-square-foot bar and restaurant that served a limited number of people. “If you were using the whole building to serve booze and food, that would be one thing,” Fred Thimm had told me. “You pay rent for the whole building and use only one floor. You have the potential to raise your gross from $1.7 to $5 million.”

With that 1969 lease agreement, the Howard Joynt era of Nathans was launched, and Nathans became a white-hot focal point of Georgetown and Washington nightlife. Fans stood five deep at the bar. Critics loved the northern Italian cuisine, new to Washington in the early 1970s. The fettuccine Alfredo, prepared by Chef Giuseppina, was sublime. The
Washington Post
ran a front-page political prognostication story with the headline
AT NATHANS, THEY SPLIT ON CANDIDATES
. But
even with business booming, my lawyers said, Howard had financial problems. Nathans often needed money and Mr. Joynt provided it.

Miriam and Sheldon uncovered an earlier tax evasion. It happened in 1977, just as we were beginning our romance, possibly simultaneously. The IRS hit Howard with a bill for $700,000 in back taxes. I was speechless—a reaction that was becoming a pattern in meetings with my lawyers. “His father advanced him the money, bailed him out.”

Was that the wedge in the marriage that was ending when I met Howard? I wasn’t going to ring up the ex-wife and ask her, but it entered my mind. Sheldon and Miriam estimated that over the twenty-eight years Howard owned Nathans, his father had knitted up the shortfall to the tune of $2 to $3 million. Miriam said that in the 1980s, Mr. Joynt advanced Howard even more money to keep the business afloat. “His last loan to him was for $500,000, and before he died”—of prostate cancer in 1989—“he forgave the debt and gave Howard the promissory note. Howard probably figured he was paying the money back to himself. He didn’t consider that income—he was just repaying the debt—so he didn’t pay tax on it. Also, he didn’t give himself a salary. He just figured what was Nathans’ money was his money, not unusual in a small business.”