Innocent Spouse (13 page)

“And this will fly?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Sheldon said, flattening his hands on the table, “but that’s where we are.”

A welter of emotions was running through me as I left that particular meeting. The news weighed me down with dismay and sadness. Were my last twenty years just one big lie? Were Howard and I
that
different? How did he carry around these burdens?
Were
they burdens? Maybe not for him, but they were for me.

When Mr. Joynt died, Howard’s safety net vanished. He was on his own, no more bailouts. Without Mr. Joynt’s subsidy, Nathans couldn’t afford itself. The landlords had no interest in working through tenant problems. If there was an issue, they simply ignored it; what they cared about was the rent. The rent was too high and Howard’s lifestyle
—our
lifestyle—was too expensive. Howard was a beneficiary of the trust established under Mr. Joynt’s will, but the income wasn’t enough. And then there was everything he passed through the business.

Howard faced a choice: Pay the rent or pay the taxes, and he chose to pay the rent. I couldn’t comprehend how he could forgo giving the feds their withholding tax. Miss one month or two months, maybe, but consistently over five years? That’s not an accident; it’s larceny. You have to have some real guts to do that, but the courage, if that’s what it was, was misplaced. Howard knew the landlords would definitely miss a monthly payment, whereas the federal government would not, at least not immediately.

Howard had liked playing the pirate, the bad boy. He wasn’t the first man who grew up soft and well off, secure and with a safety net, who liked living dangerously. The Runyonesque romance of the saloon business encouraged a boys-will-be-boys attitude and made it possible to believe that laws were for grown-ups, not for cowboys on barstools. Howard spent his working hours among the daytime barroom clientele—bookies, gamblers, drunks, fellow saloon owners, and others who lived life on the margins. Many of them seemed to be hiding from something, trying to stay off the radar to avoid a society in which most people played by the rules. In Howard’s case, this game didn’t pay. Somehow my husband had lost his way, and it pained me that he hadn’t wanted to tell me.

I wondered if the dependence on his father was at the root of his deeply buried rage. It can’t be easy for a man—and a proud man at that—to rely so much on his father’s largesse. It wasn’t money Howard could take at will; it had to be bestowed, and usually with a lecture about not getting the job done, not measuring up. Where’s the manliness in that, especially if with each bailout, as helpful as it was, he felt like less of a man? Eerily, it was not too far removed from my accepting gifts after one of Howard’s violent episodes. Did his tirades at me occur within days of receiving money from his father? I’ll never know.

I was beginning to understand the nights I would roll over in bed in the wee hours and notice Howard wide awake, staring at the ceiling. But when I met with the lawyers, I kept those thoughts to myself.

Miriam and Sheldon didn’t pass judgment; they just rattled off numbers and possible adjustments. They were confident that some of the items could be negotiated down or away. Where the IRS would not budge, they said, was in the matter of withholding. The government was understandably intolerant of an employer who withheld
taxes from employees and then put the money in his own pocket. It was the government’s money. There would be no mercy.

“I’m selling things,” I told them. “I’m sending stuff to auction, to consignment, selling it to friends. Whatever, wherever.”

“That’s good,” Miriam said. Her expression changed. The lawyerly veneer gave way to a more compassionate face. “This is hard, isn’t it?” she said. I nodded and probably betrayed my sadness. “I know. But you’re doing the right thing. We don’t know how this will turn out, but you have to be prepared.” She moved her hand toward mine on the table. She didn’t touch me, but the gesture was sensitive. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “But I hate this. I’m so afraid of losing my home. I can’t imagine what effect that would have on Spencer. To lose his father and then lose his home …” I was worried about the effect on me, too. I was not ready for that kind of ripping away. I could give up a lot, but I would rather live in our house with cots and sleeping bags and paper plates than have to let it go. It was the one solid thing in our lives.

“Don’t worry about that right now,” Miriam said.

“I want a summer there,” I said. “We need the summer on the Bay.”

“I can’t say you won’t have to sell it, but you can have a summer,” she said. “I promise you that.”

Miriam said she would meet soon with Deborah Martin, the IRS agent. “And at some point you have to tell me about yourself and your life with Howard. The whole story. This will be a large part of your defense. But I’m not ready for that yet.”

How could I share the whole story with Miriam, with anyone? Which parts did she need to know? The love story was real. He had swept me off my feet. He was my prince, and I still loved him as much as ever. It would be easy for me to tell Miriam about the fabulous times we had together, with all the fun, beauty, adventure, and affection. They were real, or at least I thought so. I was holding on to them like trying to remember a dream, even as the good parts begin to fade as the day wears on until eventually, sadly, all you can remember is that it was a good dream. Or should I just go right to the version of our lives that was emerging, the darker version in which Howard was coming more clearly into focus as a tragic charmer who lived large and fell the same way? I knew this: He had loved us, and he didn’t want to hurt us, but
by doing what he thought was helping, he
did
hurt us. His tragic flaw was his passion for the “lifestyle.” You see it in all of literature’s lovable rogues. In fiction it may be charming, but in real life it leaves a mess.

Arrangements were made to inventory our possessions. Two friendly enough strangers came into my home and fingered, fondled, and assessed everything from our socks and underwear to books, lamps, knives and forks, plates, chairs, tables, towels, Spencer’s toys, appliances, clothing, and carpets. Every last thing we owned, everything that was dear to us, was given a dollar value. The appraisers would ask me what something cost and I would hazard a guess. They would ask, “Are we lowballing or highballing?”

“What?”

“Do your lawyers want the estate to come out worth a lot or a little?”

T
HE PSYCHIATRIST SAW
me once a week. That was barely enough. No matter what, I fit him into my schedule. I couldn’t afford him. Neither could I afford Spencer’s therapist. But we couldn’t afford not to have them. At least our health insurance paid for part of it.

“Talk to me about anger,” he said in one session. “What are you doing with your anger?”

“I don’t feel any anger toward Howard, if that’s what you mean—at least none that I recognize.” I thought I spoke truthfully then. “I try to understand what happened but I bang into walls,” I told the doctor. “I just don’t have room for negative energy.” At that time succumbing to anger would have been like hooking an anchor to my life. It would have weighed me down, stopped me in my tracks. Everything was about survival; everything was about getting through the day, getting through the nightmare. Anger would have to stand in line to own a piece of my flesh, my soul.

To survive I had to stay positive, and I was determined to survive.

“Did he think I wouldn’t love him if we didn’t have a Jaguar in the driveway or a suite at the Carlyle?” I asked the doctor. “That stuff was fun but I didn’t love him for his cars.”

———

S
PENCER RECOVERED AT
his own pace. He had good days and bad days. Sometimes he was ahead of me, sometimes he lagged behind. I made time for us to be alone together. We took walks. We had picnics by the Potomac. One night we slept in sleeping bags under a starry sky on the lawn of our home on the Bay.

“Do bugs live forever?” Spencer asked me. “I want to find out what lives forever and make it so everyone can live forever. I want you to live forever, Mommy. I don’t want you to die.”

“We all die,” I said. “That can’t be changed. Remember the ‘Circle of Life’?” That was Elton John’s great song from
The Lion King
. I had taken Spencer to see the movie when he was three years old, soon after Disney released it. In it the father lion dies, leaving behind his young son. We both liked the song and when Howard died a little more than two years later, the film resonated with Spencer and me, especially Tim Rice’s lyrics to the “Circle of Life.” Spencer and I decided together to ask our friend Judith Owen to sing it at Howard’s memorial service, where we hummed along, affirming that the circle moves us through our despair “till we find our place on the path unwinding.”

“I’m going to change that, Mommy,” Spencer said. “I’m going to invent something so you won’t die.” I kissed his sweet head. I couldn’t hold him tight enough. I wanted to blanket him in love.

Another evening, in his bed, we listened through a toy stethoscope to the beating of his heart and my heart. He asked me, “What was it like to feel Daddy’s heart stop beating?”

“It was very peaceful,” I said. “Like he was being lifted up by angels.” Spencer grabbed Baby closer, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and settled into deep five-year-old thought.

I
T WAS A
quiet evening at the apartment. Spencer was tucked in and asleep. I poured a glass of wine and sat on the floor in the den to sort through old photographs, putting them in groups and loading them into a storage box. Our life together was there in the photos: A Polaroid from our first picnic beside a stream in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My brother’s pictures from our wedding, when Howard playfully kissed me with a mouthful of cake. Our honeymoon in Bermuda, both of us on mopeds, tan and smiling. Standing near the surf on the rocky
coast of Maine; on a sandy beach in the Caribbean; in Utah during a cross-country drive; on the California coast, my hair wildly frizzed by the salt air; with Spencer between us, only minutes after his birth. So many Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries. Laughter at dinner parties with friends, caught in a flash frame. Silly moments. Somber moments. A portrait here, a portrait there; images of us young, and older, but never old. That’s the photo we’d never have.

In the midst of all the drama and complications of being a solo parent, of having the IRS and Nathans on my back, of the continuing revelations about Howard’s past, sometimes I needed simply to step away and grieve. The pictures made that happen. Tears spilled from my eyes, falling onto the photos. Oddly, as painful as it was, this kind of pain felt better than the pain of coping with Nathans or worrying about where I’d end up with the IRS. Widowhood had its touchstones. Crying over old photos is part of the grieving process. But there was no guide for what I was going through with Nathans and the IRS.

I put all the photos in a big box, sealed it with heavy tape, and packed it away.

E
ARLIER
I
HAD
learned that we owned a boat I didn’t know we owned—the Hinckley sailboat Howard sold in Maine—but there was also a boat I knew we owned, one that was usually tied up at our home dock, a thirty-eight-foot powerboat named
Arcadia
, and I could sell her. In fact, I
had
to sell her, and fortunately she sold fast and for a good price. The money went into the estate account destined for the lawyers and the IRS, not into mine. Shortly after Memorial Day and just before the boat went off to the new owners, a dear friend, Randy Parks, helped Spencer and me stow our personal gear into canvas bags. We passed them from the afterdeck to the car like a bucket brigade.

“Today we’re saying good-bye to
Arcadia,
” I told Spencer.

“But why, Mommy, why?”

“Because Daddy was her captain, and a good captain, and I would probably just run her into the rocks.” He thought that was funny, thankfully, and didn’t question me further.

After this we would be down to just one boat, Howard’s eighteen-and-a-half-foot Herreshoff, the
Carol Ann
, which to me seemed small enough to keep and too sentimental to let go. I had fantasies that Spencer and I would take her out. Or, perhaps, he would grow up to want her for himself. Regardless, she was a keeper.

When we finished unloading everything, we sat in the cockpit. It was comfortable and familiar. Howard, Spencer, and I had enjoyed some happy family hours on
Arcadia
. I found a half-full bottle of Mount Gay rum in the galley and on my last trip up, I said, “Don’t want to leave this, do we? Let’s have a sip. A toast, really.”

“Why not?” Randy said. “Howard would approve.” It was eleven a.m. I poured some rum into two Dixie cups and handed one to Randy.

“To Howard,” Randy said.

“To
Arcadia,
” I said. We touched cups together and knocked back the rum.

“I want some, too,” Spencer demanded.

“Honey, it’s rum. You can’t have rum,” I said.

“I want to do a toast to
Arcadia
and Daddy,” he said.

“Okay, a little toast—but you aren’t going to like it, I promise you.” I poured half a teaspoon of rum into a cup and handed it to him.

“To Daddy,” he said, then reenacted the way we had tossed the rum down our throats. Before it got past his tongue he spit it out, spraying wide and hard. That brought laughter to what was otherwise a sad farewell. I locked the hatch, fastened the canvas cover, and stepped off the boat. It was the first of many good-byes to the life we’d known. I resolved not to look back. If I didn’t look back I would be okay. Go forward. Always forward. Forward. Forward. Forward. And I did.

W
E WERE INTO
summer but it didn’t feel like any summer I’d ever known. Every day was a battle or an avalanche. At Nathans, Doug Moran and I paced warily around each other, watching. The staff sensed the tension, and I didn’t like that. They were also beginning to hear about the IRS case, and I didn’t like that, either. It’s not that I expected to keep it secret, but I couldn’t talk about it publicly, and the rumor mill, as it usually does, was certain to make a swordfish into a whale.