Innocent Spouse (37 page)

“You can unload the bar and move to New York,” he said in my ear. “You like it here, anyway.”

I didn’t know what to say. No matter our friendship, he was still Walter Cronkite and this was a vulnerable, sensitive moment, and we were at a crowded table in the noisy back room of a busy restaurant. It was hard to hear and he couldn’t hear very well even when there wasn’t lots of noise. For me, the room disappeared around the two of us. Instinctively I sensed his “proposal,” if it was a proposal, was probably an emotional whim, not something borne from love or need or desire. If anything, he was still tender after Betsy’s death, and his grief surely enhanced his view of Spencer’s and my aloneness and vulnerability. I think he wanted to do something for us, and this made sense. He had his hand on my hand. It was a touching but also awkward moment. He’d never before been this intimate with me. I had to say something, and the words had to be sincere and gentle.

“That’s such a loving suggestion and I’m deeply touched,” I shouted so he could hear me clearly. “I know you want to help us, and just having
you in our lives helps so much. But Walter, I have a mess on my hands in Washington and I wouldn’t want to involve anyone I care about in that, and getting involved with me would force you to be involved. And I care about you too much to do that to you.” I tried to explain that Nathans wasn’t a situation I could simply walk away from; the legalities would follow me. I wasn’t a free woman under the terms of Nathans lease. I couldn’t give it away. What I didn’t say—couldn’t say—was that no matter how much it moved me, I couldn’t be married to Walter. It would be like marrying my father.

“Would you think about it?” he said. “Because I’m serious. We don’t have to say another word about it, but the offer stands.”

It was neither warmly romantic nor coldly businesslike. If anything, it felt like a friend throwing a life ring, as much as or more than anyone had offered us.

“I know you care, Walter. That’s always with me.”

Funny, but we both continued on to other subjects and the evening rolled along. The marriage proposal never came up again. Walter found warm companionship with a widow, Joanna Simon, who was good for him. She was patient and loving, especially as his hearing went from little to zero. I don’t know why he didn’t marry
her
. That would have made sense to me.

Spencer and I had dinner with Walter and Joanna, visited them at Walter’s New York apartment and, memorably, spent time with them one July on Martha’s Vineyard, where Walter had a second home. The evening of our arrival, the group of us, plus Walter’s daughter, Kathy, had dinner at the Edgartown Yacht Club. By now, Spencer towered over Walter and doted on him, taking his arm as he walked. The next day, Walter and Joanna took Spencer and me out for a sail. It was sunny with a good breeze. Walter steered his handsome Hinckley off the dock and out of the harbor, only then handing the helm over to the captain.

When he wasn’t resting on Joanna’s lap or contentedly whistling, Walter put Spencer at the helm and showed him how to read the wind and the sails. I have a picture of Walter next to Spencer, the two of them looking toward the horizon. It was a happy day and a happy memory; it was also the last time I saw Walter. The first Christmas after he died I kept expecting—and missing—his call.

V
ISITS TO THE
psychiatrist were not a luxury for me but a necessity. It was like going to a brain-spa where I could let down, be brutally honest, and vent my frustrations. I went in the door a mess and came out a little less of a mess. In the beginning I had a session every week, later they were down to once or twice a month. “Fine-tuning,” I called it. Sometimes I sat through a session feeling on top of the world, like I was getting control, learning my business, making my way. Other times, not.

That’s where and how I was when I walked into my psychiatrist’s familiar office in the late summer of 2005, almost nine years after Howard died, a period of time I was beginning to view as my lost decade. So much water was under the bridge. I had changed so much, but I was still stuck in a place I didn’t want to be. When I sat down in my usual chair I was calm, but when we shifted gears from my private life to Nathans, I choked up. “I’m out of options,” I lamented, recounting how high the debt had grown—close to three quarters of a million dollars—that the landlords were silent to my requests to renegotiate or to take back the keys, that I couldn’t afford to keep paying lawyers to beat their heads against a stone wall, that I could see my sixtieth birthday on the horizon, and, worst of all, that my son saw his mother in a constant state of stress. “Yes, there’s
The Q&A Café
but it’s a hit show on the
Titanic
. No matter what I do, we’re still going down. If not today, then when the lease is up and the landlords ask for the excess rent they claim I owe them. By that time it will equal the value of my house.”

“I still don’t understand why you can’t just declare bankruptcy and walk away,” he said.

“Because I signed that personal guaranty on the lease. I didn’t know what it was all those years ago, but what it means is that even if I close or go bankrupt I personally still have to meet the rent. Nathans
could be zapped by Martians and the rent would have to be paid. I’m cooked.”

“Why did you sign that?” he asked as he had several times before. “It made you an indentured slave.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “Who the hell knows why, but I signed it. It’s done.”

His words prompted a moment of reflection and then tears, a flood of tears. They welled up from that pool of frustration that sloshed around somewhere deep inside me. Words stumbled out between snuffles and nose wiping. “All because of what Howard did … and because I tried to run a business I didn’t want. Did I kill babies in an earlier life?” I stopped to take a tissue. “I’m exhausted. I don’t sleep at night. I stare at the ceiling and worry. I just want options, but I don’t see any. I don’t know what to do. I can’t think anymore … and … and … you know … I do this all alone.… Yeah, I see lots of lawyers, I get sound advice, but there’s no one in it with me. It’s … it’s … just me … at the end of the day.… It’s just me alone at home with a child … trying to figure it out … do the right thing.”

The office was quiet, except for my tears, which slowly subsided to a whimper. “You are in it alone,” he said, “but you are very strong. You fall down, you get back up. It’s been one avalanche after another, and it takes a toll.”

“You have no idea,” I said.

Actually he did have an idea. He’d listened to the saga from the beginning. “It’s good I’m not an alcoholic because I’d be off the deep end. As it is, I do drink too much, take too many drugs, eat too much. I take it all out on my body. Every time I go to the doctor with an ailment he says it is stress related. My lower back is like a brick, my shoulders are locked in high gear, and I have TMJ disorder in my jaw. I used to be the most supple and relaxed person, ages ago. Now, I’m a tightly wound wreck.”

“No one can cope indefinitely with heavy stress,” he warned me. “It does take a toll on overall health. You need a break.”

There was a pause, then he asked me, “Have you thought of going to Brendan Sullivan?”

My look was incredulous. “Brendan Sullivan? Well, sure, in my fantasies.” Brendan Sullivan, the lawyer to go to when all the options
have evaporated. Of course I’d thought of Brendan Sullivan. Anyone in Washington—and beyond—who really needed a defender in court would think of Brendan V. Sullivan, Jr. He was senior partner at the world-class firm of Williams and Connolly, protégé of the late Edward Bennett Williams, and one of the nation’s top trial lawyers. He’d tried a lot of famous cases. He was known for dogged preparation, self-confidence, toughness, and winning. “Brendan Sullivan isn’t gonna give the time of day to a saloon owner on the ropes.”

My psychiatrist looked across the desk. “He’s a friend of mine,” he said. “Would you mind if I called him on your behalf? Perhaps he’d give you a consultation. That’s what you need. You have nothing to lose.”

“Oh, God,
yes
. Just to hear his take on this mess.”

Not only did Brendan Sullivan see me, but he agreed to take me on as a pro bono client. His first words to me were, “You must have a sense of humor, because I read what you’ve been through and in my entire career I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this. It’s bizarre. You’ve got to be able to laugh.”

“Yes, I know. Yes, I do laugh,” I said. “That’s my only relief.”

“You’ve really had it all. Your husband dies, the IRS, the city, the lease, bad management, exploding manhole covers, a huge public works project outside your door, and the landlords—round after round after round.”

His voice was warm and reassuring, approachable, with an “I’m in your corner” quality. I could easily imagine him wooing a jury with that voice. When we met for the first time, I thought that if anyone ever makes a movie called
The Brendan Sullivan Story
, John Slattery has the part. The lean build, the silver hair, the entirely fair Irish face—and there’s no doubt Slattery could harness the voice, with its shades of Rhode Island. They could be twins, though Brendan would be the older brother and would have an amused but skeptical attitude about his sibling’s career in the entertainment business—not that arguing a case before judge and jury doesn’t require performance skills. Brendan was one for the history books. He may have had his suit jacket off and his shirtsleeves up, and asked kindly at the outset of every meeting, “How’s Spencer?,” but there was an inner toughness that made me think I could sail across storm-tossed oceans with the man.

When it came to getting my neck out of the noose that was the
Nathans lease, Brendan Sullivan changed the game. It’s not that a slew of other good lawyers hadn’t tried, but there’d been no progress, and the inertia only pushed me deeper into debt—to the landlords and everyone else. With a big gun like Brendan in the picture, the Halkias family would have to realize I was dead serious about wanting them to take back the keys: to let me out of the lease, to take the business for themselves, or to renegotiate our agreement with an eventual exit strategy. Certainly on the bad days, but even on the good days, all I wanted was out. I just wanted out, without having to give up my house to pay added rent they claimed they were owed. I’d already had to give up one house in this saga, our home on the Bay, and I didn’t want to lose another. To get out from under Nathans was to regain my freedom, all kinds of freedom: most of all to rebuild my life and my career, and for Spencer and me to move on from the detritus left by Howard. Since he was five years old my son had known me only as a woman at war. While he was still sharing the same home with me I wanted him to know me as a woman at peace.

From the outset, Brendan said “no” to paying any rent claim. The landlords, in his view, had agreed to the rent I did pay because they had cashed the checks. He based this on the likelihood a court could say that by their actions the landlords had, in fact, agreed to the reduced rent. Brendan’s theory, which he was willing to argue in a courtroom, was simply that “the landlords had repeatedly accepted the reduced rent, without complaint, every month for more than sixty months. In essence the landlords had acknowledged for years that the rent stated in the lease was unable to be sustained by the business. The landlords knew it and accepted it.” It was “nonnegotiable,” he said. “Off the table.” Period.

Brendan took the reins and I left the matter to him. If he needed to talk to me, he would let me know. It was the first time I’d felt a semblance of peace since before Howard died. But, of course, back at Nathans, like clockwork, Murphy’s Law was reliably in play.

N
ATHANS’ NEW CRISIS
was a conflagration that demanded the small-business equivalent of a four-alarm emergency response. This time it was Vito. He disappeared—just like that. We couldn’t find him and
no one knew what was up. For several days he didn’t call, which was unheard-of for him, and there was no answer when we called his home or cell phone. Eventually his sister let us know he was in the hospital with a failing heart. This time he’d burned out seriously. My God, I wondered, did Nathans have the power to kill? First Howard. Then one of the landlords had died after breaking his neck in a household fall. His son swore to my face: “Nathans killed him.” Vito’s sister appeared to feel the same way about her brother.

Nobody but Vito knew how Nathans got through a day. Our accounts were built on so many promises to so many vendors—and so much bank float—and only he knew the formula that kept it all working. But Vito was unconscious in a hospital bed. From the moment Vito disappeared there were unhappy people on the phone demanding money, and we were perilously on the verge of losing the power, water, and phones. The only person in the office who could help me was the brand-new administrative assistant, a recent graduate of Colby College and completely wet behind the ears. Jon Moss had never before worked at a restaurant. He’d been at Nathans all of two weeks. He barely knew where to find the paper clips and now he had to help me prevent what could be a disaster.

In Nathans’ cramped, cluttered office, with the rattraps on standby and the fans stirring a feeble breeze, Jon and I went into battle mode, largely unaware of the last days of summer playing out in the sunny world above. We worked from morning into evening. With the dogged help of our friendly local banker, Joseph Reamer, we tracked checks as they went through the system, trying to catch them just before they exploded. I drove Jon to the offices of various utility companies and idled the car outside while he ran in with cashier’s checks that spared Nathans for another month. We did the same with weekly tax payments. We sweated. We paced. But we made it through the storm. When the ordeal was over, I made Jon Moss the new general manager.

We were the oddest of odd couples—an accidental restaurateur who’d had a dysfunctional business thrust upon her and a manager half her age who’d also never worked at a restaurant—but somehow we were a good fit. Jon brought aboard a twenty-first-century business paradigm, to the extent that was possible at Nathans. He also put Spencer’s and my survival into the equation and tried to protect me
from mounting debt. He learned to deal with the landlords, especially family liaison George Halkias, who called often, always worried I was about to go AWOL. As I did at home with my son, I shared a dark sense of humor with Jon that carried us through the highs and lows. I thought, “We can make it. We can get through this.” As we sailed into 2006 and 2007, Jon managed to show me some genuine profit. In 2007 we grossed just under $2 million, a high-water mark. Bills got paid, rent got paid, taxes got paid, and I got paid. Jon chipped away at the monstrous debt. We had fewer angry vendors, and the landlords seemed more accepting of reality.
The Q&A Café
continued as a success, attracting more notable individuals to sit with me for an interview. Our heyday didn’t last. It was just a year or two, but it was my only happy and contented stretch as owner.