Innocent Spouse (35 page)

“Actually, Carol, you shouldn’t say that. What you should realize is that, whether you like it or not, you know what you’re doing. Pat yourself on the back. You’re better for Nathans than that outside management company ever was.”

Pat myself on the back? Nice thought, but no, I didn’t think so. Maybe when I was rid of Nathans.

A
T LEAST
I could talk to Vito, confide my doubts to him and share my ideas, which I couldn’t do with the management company, who didn’t want to hear my thoughts about my own business. Nathans was a part of my life that was tough to ignore and tough to discuss honestly with others. I tried not to take it home, because it was impossible to discuss with a young son. I tried not to take it to cocktail parties, either, or out to dinner with men. When a man did innocently ask, “How’s Nathans?” and I answered honestly, he would soon be crawling toward the exit, or at least eager to get me home to my front door. I was happiest when the subject didn’t come up at all. Sometimes at parties where people didn’t know me I would make up a fake job or say I was still a journalist. Then, just my luck, someone would walk up and go, “Oh, do you know Carol? She owns the best bar in town.” For me, at that point, the party was over.

The cemetery where Howard was buried is on Oak Hill, Georgetown’s highest point. Spencer and I would visit occasionally and leave flowers and plant kisses on Howard’s white marble bench-shaped gravestone. When I had a really bad day, when I felt the walls and sky were falling on me, when I felt my most alone or was my most depressed, I’d go to his grave, not knowing when I got there whether I wanted to scream at it or to cry. Most often I’d cry for a while, dry my eyes, and then carry on.

S
INCE THE EARLY
years of owning Nathans I had used every opportunity for free publicity to help the place get its buzz back. At this I was a natural. I would talk to a reporter about anything—and I mean anything—if it meant getting the word
Nathans
in print or on television. In addition to my own drama, the exploding manhole covers, and routine Georgetown crime stories, I was quoted in the
Washington Post
on how to make the perfect cosmopolitan; the
New York Times
asked me to comment on the Barbara Walters interview with Monica Lewinsky; another
Washington Post
reporter included me in a story on mothers
who sleep while waiting in the carpool line (I was an expert); local TV always liked an on-camera comment about Halloween escapades in Georgetown; a restaurant writer wanted to know what the cleanup crew finds on the bar floor after a big night (“wedding rings”); various media asked about the impact of the (good or bad) economy on a small business; and
Newsweek
wanted to know whether Washington was hip. I said yes, “Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll do exist in Washington.” Whatever the subject, I did my best to utter the perfect sound-bite, to have a quotable opinion—for one reason and one reason only: It got my saloon’s name out there.

In October 2001, I created something that got attention for Nathans but also suited me to a T. I hosted a talk show right there in Nathans’ back dining room. I called it
The Q&A Café
, and it quickly became popular and, best of all, satisfying for me. Essentially it was the Charlie Rose show in Nathans at lunchtime with me as Charlie. I created it as a response to the terrorist attacks, when so many people seemed desperate for information. Week after week, my gets were experts on terrorism and Islam and Osama bin Laden. For almost an hour I interviewed one guest—the two of us sitting across from each other on barstools—while around us the patrons enjoyed lunch. From the aftermath of 9/11, the subject matter expanded to every topic under the sun. I liked the challenge of booking interesting guests, loved the research in preparation for them, and was increasingly comfortable with the onstage interviews. After all, I had trained with the masters. Each week I looked forward to my moment with the audience and guest. It was doubly exciting when a comment made by a notable guest landed in a newspaper column with the attribution, “said at
The Q&A Café
at Nathans.” I no longer had to give a clever quote to market my business. My interviews made news. It was gratifying to see the pile of clippings grow, and even more gratifying when the show was videotaped and began to appear on two local cable channels. If my talk show in a restaurant could be called restaurant work then this was the restaurant work I was made for.

With each show the audience of men and women filed in, paid the fee at the bar, and dashed into the back dining room to snag good seats. Some people came to every show. We served house-made potato chips before the program began and a warm meal as the interview started.
Since there were no reserved seats, late arrivals were blended into other tables. Strangers met and became friends. Some ordered beer and wine, and the camaraderie was strong. I called them
The Q&A Café
“lunch bunch.” I welcomed each person. Those were the only times I felt comfortable greeting guests in the restaurant.

The Q&A Café
made national news when Maury Povich and Connie Chung appeared only two days after a member of his staff hit him with sexual harassment charges. They wouldn’t talk about the suit, but that didn’t matter. The audience included plenty of reporters. We made news again when Deborah Jeane Palfrey, “the D.C. Madam,” in a rare interview, said Washington was a good market for her line of work. Dan Rather appeared soon after filing suit against CBS News and got a tear in his eye when talking about the suit’s stress on his family. That got me on morning network television, with a clip of Dan. When Joe Wilson, the former ambassador who publicly questioned the rationale behind the Iraq War, appeared for an interview he gladly posed for me afterward for a photo for the Nathans website. Smiling in the picture with him was his previously unphotographed wife, former CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose cover the Bush administration had blown in an attempt to discredit Wilson. The photo went viral and global.

My favorite interviews, however, were with people such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and famous for his work with the HIV/AIDS virus. He talked about bioterrorism and the vulnerability of the nation’s subway systems to a deadly attack. Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, was fascinating in the plainspoken way he told his story of global business success. Another favorite was Kenneth Feinberg, special master of the U.S. government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, who put human faces to the thousands of family members who were left behind to cope with their losses.

Nathans brought a lot of anxiety and pain to my life, but the success of
The Q&A Café
made up for scraping to pay the plumber. It was my success, something I created all on my own and that I understood and could do well.

Nathans gave me another pleasure, too, and it can’t be discounted. It gave me time to spend with my son that might not have come with
other jobs. I was my own boss, and because of that it was easier to slip away as needed. As Spencer grew from little giggle-puss to teenage boy, I cherished and embraced the role of parent and all its rewarding and sometimes tedious parts. I liked driving him to and from school each day, to athletic practices and games, and to guitar practice; I tagged along on field trips, showed up for school assemblies, and made all the parent-teacher conferences. For a while he was a skateboard fiend, and I became versed in Washington’s best “spots,” could talk half-pipes with the best, and sat in one arena or another, biting my nails, as he thrilled to the harrowing performances of superstar Tony Hawk. When his passion turned to lacrosse, Spencer played year-round, in school and in leagues. Game after game, I arrived with my trusty folding chair. I learned the sport, knew the names of the plays and gear, and could debate the merits of the top teams in the NCAA rankings; together we traveled to many college games and tournaments. I could do these “guy” things with him because, like some of the dads, I had the time because I was fortunate to own my own business.

In the afternoons when I waited in the carpool line, however, I became a “normal” mother. He wasn’t crazy about me catching a quick nap—“Mom, people see you sleeping and they think you’re passed out!”—but I told him if I didn’t catch a snooze I’d probably drive off the side of the road on the way home. He cared how I appeared. It was especially important that I look young, to match the younger mothers. When gray hairs started to show he would say, “It’s time to get your roots done.” Comments like that made me laugh, and I loved when he made me laugh. But time moves inexorably on, as parents well know. The boy becomes a young man. One day Spencer was a five-year-old with his hand in mine, and the next his draft card arrived in the mail.

When he was in elementary school, especially through first and second grades, his teachers and I knew Spencer needed special consideration. He was fragile, and we watched closely for ways he might act out because of his father’s death. Through guidance from his grief therapist, Ellen Sanford, and my own psychiatrist, I learned important lessons about how to raise a child who had lost a parent. The first thing Ellen said was “Too many families try to shield a child from a parent’s death. Don’t do that, because you can’t.” She continued, “If you want
him to grow up healthy, don’t act like it didn’t happen. He’ll begin to think Howard never existed, or that perhaps it was his fault his father died.”

“Ask Spencer about his father,” I would suggest to his teachers. “Its okay, even good, to encourage him to talk.” We were at a meal with friends when their daughter, who was Spencer’s age, blurted out, “Spencer, you don’t have a father. Your father is dead!” Her parents were mortified and started to scold her and apologize to me. But I told them it was okay and meant it. Spencer said, “Yes. My dad died from pneumonia but we have his picture everywhere and he’s alive in our hearts.” When his first-grade class had the children talk about their parents, I urged the teacher to let Spencer make a presentation about his father. This particular teacher, Dan Specter, was remarkable. He gave Spencer his time, even if it meant sitting out in the hall for private chats. Occasionally, the three of us would take weekend walks or go to the movies. Dan wrote a letter to Howard, and Spencer brought it home and cherished it.

As Spencer got older, into fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, and especially in middle school, I told his teachers it was time to treat him like any other boy. At that moment between adolescence and becoming a young man, he was tall for his age, good-looking, lean, athletic, smart, well mannered, and popular. At school he did well academically but had brushes with upper management caused by the bad decisions boys can sometimes make. I didn’t like his acting out, but I tried to understand and face it head-on. I worried about how it related to Howard. Was it genetically hardwired or was it insecurity? On occasion as he aged, I would dole out more truthful bits of background on his father, filling in the gray areas of the legacy that had landed on us, helping him to see a bigger and more focused picture. I measured what I told him based on what I thought he could accept and understand. I always made clear that Howard loved us, and loved him most of all.

Mischief would happen. Transgressions would happen. Unfortunately, too many times what I’d hear from school officials, and sometimes other parents, was “I know this happened because he doesn’t have a father.” Excuse me? He has a parent! Whatever he’d done was because he was a teenage boy who occasionally used bad judgment, not
because he didn’t have a father or because his mother owned a saloon. Or was it? I did my best, but was it enough?

I was home almost every night. If I went out with friends, I had a trusty sitter and was home well before midnight. If he had a friend sleep over, I was on duty, not out partying. Most nights I was in bed by ten, not hosting after-hours parties at Nathans. I was defensive, I know. What I wanted was for these well-meaning but hurtful people to give me some credit. As for my son, when male teachers offered to “father” him, I would say, “Thank you for volunteering, but he doesn’t need you to be his father. He needs you to be his friend.” I wished his uncles, my brothers David and Robert, could have been more involved in his growing up, and also his aunt, Martha, but David was in Seattle and Robert lived out in Virginia, and they had busy lives. Martha and her husband, Vijay, moved to Washington and lived near us, and we did see them from time to time, but for whatever reason she did not have a pronounced role in Spencer’s life. I wondered if it was just too hard; Spencer and I, and the challenges that had landed on us, were perhaps too painful a reminder of what her brother had done.

What I thought was best for my son and what
was
best for my son were not always the same thing, and the learning curves were sometimes steep and painful. My greatest blunders involved the schools I chose for him. I was so hell-bent on making sure his educational environment was traditional and what I mistakenly viewed as “normal” that I simply missed seeing who he was. After trying it for grades four through eight, I was not happy with the coat-and-tie boys’-school choice, believing the single-sex setup may have been a factor in his occasional run-ins with school authorities. Mentioning this to one of his former teachers, she said, “You know, he’d do well at Georgetown Day School.” It was not the first time this coed school had been recommended, but I had a bigger idea. He would be in ninth grade and entering puberty, and I thought he would benefit from some distance from me, some independence, and that a coed boarding school made sense. We applied to only one, and he was accepted. I called it Hogwarts. It was an old and respected school in New Jersey, where we knew some families. We liked the fact that it was not too big. It was close enough but not too close. I was positive this separation from me would be good for him, and that he’d thrive. Wrong.

From practically day one he was in hot water for one stupid act or another. It seemed to me he had more weekend detentions than he had weekends in which to serve them. Talking back to his dorm supervisor, talking back to a senior, not being prepared for a class, needling a classmate. When I talked to him on the phone or drove up for a visit, he’d assure me “It’s all good. I’ve got it under control. Don’t worry. I’ll stay out of trouble.” His offenses, while disturbing to me, at least did not count as “strikes.” This was a two-strike school, meaning just that: Two strikes and you’re out.