Innocent Spouse (17 page)

“Go,” he said. “Give yourself the time away. Enjoy yourself. Spencer will be fine. If it makes you feel better, call him every hour on the hour and drive him nuts. But he’ll be fine.”

———

I
GOT TO
know another widow who had had her own experience with the IRS. It didn’t turn out very well. Leona Helmsley served time in prison for tax fraud. Her case was in every public way the opposite of sympathetic. In her trial she was quoted as saying, among many other incendiary gems, that she didn’t pay taxes because “only the little people pay taxes.” In my pursuit of an interview for Larry King, I invited her to dinner. We went to the ultra-upscale French restaurant Daniel, which at the time was on East Seventy-Sixth Street. It was at the top of the heap among New York restaurants. I’d heard that it was a favorite of Mrs. Helmsley, who liked everything haute, including the cuisine and the wine. Mrs. Helmsley didn’t eat in downscale restaurants. I supposed they were for the “little people.”

A well-polished long black limousine pulled up on Seventy-Sixth Street outside Daniel precisely on time and out stepped the “Queen of Mean.” She looked great, much brighter than she had been at an earlier lunch with Larry, his fiancée, Shawn Southwick, and me at the Park Lane, one of her hotels. Her short dark hair appeared soft and not the least like a helmet. She wore an attractive black linen dress that hit just above the knee. Around her neck was a double strand of pearls so amazing that later, during the meal, I asked if I could touch them. “Sure,” she said, as if people asked her that all the time. The pearls were the size and weight of marbles. More haute than that you could not get.

As we walked to the table a number of people reached out to greet her. She was gracious. I did not sense any of the bitterness that had showed at our lunch.

“That man who just kissed me on both cheeks,” she said as we took our seats, “he tried to outsmart me in a deal.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I outsmarted
him,
” she said, placing the napkin on her lap.

Daniel Boulud, the superstar chef, came to the table to say hello and to ask, “Can I cook for you?” We were not about to say no.

Mrs. Helmsley flirted with him. “You ought to come work for me,” she said. “I’ve got a good restaurant over at the Park Lane. We could be a good team.”

I wondered what this famous chef thought about her offer. He seemed to be appropriately flattered. When he walked away, she leaned into me and said, “He’s good, you know.
Very
good.”

We talked about her life, my life, her IRS story, my IRS story, her husband’s death, my husband’s death, her business, my business, and prison. “You know, they liked me there,” she said, referring to her fellow inmates. “But I wanted out.
Every day
I wanted out.”

I wondered what it would have been like for Howard if he’d been indicted, convicted, and sentenced to prison. I think the humiliation would have done him in. But Mrs. Helmsley seemed to be made of tougher stuff. I told her a few details of my case, including that the IRS said I owed them almost three million.

“Sell what you’ve got to sell,” she said, waving her hand in a grand dismissive gesture. “Give ’em the money. Get on with your life.”

I looked at her. “That’s easy for you to say, Mrs. Helmsley. You’re a billionaire.” To my relief, she laughed. But it was true. “What properties do you own in New York, Mrs. Helmsley?” I asked. “How big is your real estate empire?”

She ticked off a list of impressive addresses. She was in the midst of selling a lot of them. “But I’m not selling the Empire State Building. I’m going to keep that.”

“You go, girl,” I said. “You keep the Empire State Building.”

The wine made her cheerful. She cracked jokes, flirted with the handsome French waiters, and invited them to come work for her, too. She showed me a soft side that would win people over if she could only reveal it on television. I told her all the ways Larry made the hardest cases look good in live interviews. I suggested there would be a positive response from the public and media, especially if we put some focus on her large gifts to charities.

The soft side dropped away and she turned cold and serious. “It doesn’t matter. They’d kill me,” she said. “They’d kill me from the start. I could go on the show and Larry and I could have a good time together, but the next day the press would kill me. There’s no way around it.”

After dinner, at her car, I said, “Leona, come visit Washington. Come have dinner with me at Nathans. Come see the studio. See Larry. We’ll all get together and have some fun.”

“When I get my jet out of the shop, dear,” she said, disappearing into the back of her long black car.

The next day her representative Howard Rubenstein was on the
phone. “She had a good time, Carol, but she’s not changing her mind about an interview. There’s no good reason for her to put herself out there.”

I would get the occasional note from her, but we never met again. There were no network interviews. She died in 2007, leaving an estimated $4 billion estate, $12 million of it in trust for her dog.

W
HEN
I
FOUND
time to mourn, I mourned, fitting it in between all the moments when I had to be alert, in charge, responsible, and dedicated. Mourning is an emotional roller coaster. The lowest low always came after the highest high. Hairpin turns came suddenly, and then everything was upside down, the whole world on top of me, my feet in the air, speeding. Then, nothing. Full stop. A day or two or three later, the ride would begin again.

I was no longer surprised by how good I could feel one minute and how miserable the next. I understood that the mood swings were unpredictable. I learned to roll with them and move on. Spencer swung between being a happy-go-lucky, perfectly normal five-year-old boy and Damien, the Antichrist. I rolled with that, too. Only rarely now did Spencer ask me to kill him so he could be with his father “in heaven.” But he told me repeatedly that he didn’t feel like he fit in with his friends. That disturbed me, but his therapist assured me it was normal. He was a little boy trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again and set him back on the wall, intact and whole.

“I’m the only boy who doesn’t have a father,” he said, which was true in the technical sense of a living father in our particular circle of friends.

I told him, “It won’t always be like that. As life goes on you’ll meet other boys and girls who don’t have a father, and you will be a step ahead and able to help them.”

We didn’t talk about the loss of Howard as much as we talked about the life of Howard. I wanted Howard to be part of our daily dialogue, as a reminder to Spencer that he did have a father and that his father was an important part of his existence. Many times I told him about the day I told Howard I was pregnant. “I came into the den in the afternoon with the little plastic stick that shows if a mommy is going
to have a baby, and it showed that I was going to have you. He was reading a book and I waved the little wand in front of him.”

“What did Daddy do?”

“Oh, he jumped for joy. We both did.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“I just did. You were exactly who we both wanted.”

Spencer could be incredibly loving and sweet. But he had his dark moods, too, and sometimes those moods were very dark. One day he said, looking very sad, “I don’t have a daddy.”

A therapist might have suggested I say, “Let’s talk about it,” or something in the therapeutic ballpark. But there was no therapist around at that moment. “Yes, you do,” I said. “You’ll always have a daddy. It’s just that your daddy is dead, in heaven, and watching out for you from there.”

In a fit of frustration he yelled, “I hate you. I wish you weren’t my mommy.” A little later he told me, “I loved Daddy. Not you. I still love Daddy. I love Daddy more than you. I wish you were the one who died.” I let it roll off me, but there was a painful familiarity. Oddly, even though he was a five-year-old child, he sounded just like his father when his father was Mr. Hyde. Already he looked a lot like his father. That was fine, I thought; look like him, just don’t be like him.

I did my best to handle Spencer’s outbursts, but there was no guidebook. Typically I went with one part ignoring to one part reprimanding to one part “Let’s talk about these feelings you’re having.” Later I could always think of other responses that might have been better, but maybe not. We were both grieving. He was five years old and had lost his father. It was hard. I was forty-seven and had lost my husband and simultaneously acquired his status as defendant in a tax fraud case and his debt to the government. That was hard, too. If the IRS didn’t decide I was the innocent spouse, we might lose everything, including a place to sleep at night. I tried not to think about that. It was too terrifying.

I learned to be tolerant with myself as well as with Spencer. Children never realize how much they can hurt their parents until they’re parents themselves. Often parents don’t realize the depth and intensity of their children’s feelings. But I was the grown-up. I had to keep remembering that. Sometimes I wanted to blow back at him, but,
instead, I went into the bathroom and cried. I tried to ignore the pop psychology that paints a challenging picture for solo mothers, but still I worried whether I had the mettle to raise a son alone. Could I forecast the damage Howard’s death would cost, head it off, and wrap him in enough love to protect him from the empty and lonely feelings? I would look at my darling little boy and wonder, Who will you grow up to be? I was not sure how much of his father I wanted in or out of the mix, or whether it was already genetically predetermined.

Our weekends at the Bay could be tough for Spencer. On the one hand he had me all to himself, but there was a big “on the other hand.” From the moment we arrived I was busy with essential household tasks, which ranged from throwing out dead mice to dealing with the bad news in the mail to checking the phone messages and dealing with the bad news there. I had a phone stuck to my ear while I put away groceries, opened windows, swept, straightened, and organized. There were calls from Nathans,
Larry King Live
, and the lawyers.

When I got outside to play with him at last, I was whipped, spent, wasted, and brain-dead. “Come on, Mommy, let’s play ‘divers,’ ” Spencer would beg. “Let’s dive for treasure.” I was collapsed beside the pool, but I managed to toss a few toys into the water for him to go after. That wasn’t good enough. “Mommy, Mommy, you have to be in the water, too. You have to be a diver, too.” Eventually I’d kick myself into gear and fall into the pool where we played till he was running on fumes. I was already on empty.

In the house, Spencer and the dog followed me around as close as pilot fish, with Spencer saying, “Will you play with me?” “Will you read to me?” “Can I go swimming?” “Can we walk in the woods?” The dog, a small white bichon frise named Teddy, whined because he wanted me to go outside and throw his ball. When I went to the bathroom they both stood outside the door, Spencer knocking and the dog scratching. Sitting on the toilet, tired as I was, I had to laugh.

I
TRIED TO
be at Nathans during dinner at least three nights a week. Alone, I didn’t know what to do with myself and tended to simply lurk in a back corner, staring at the customers. Staff would say “Excuse me,” as they tried to maneuver around me. I was in the way. With Martha
or a girlfriend—and sometimes Spencer—I could be in the place and feel like I belonged. Spencer enjoyed Nathans. He’d gobble down a plate of pasta while the waitstaff doted on him. When we could we’d include his friends and their parents, which he loved, because a whole group of us would sit around a big table with lots of food, chatter, and laughter. I liked it, too.

My favorite place to hang out was not in the bar but in the back room, and always in the red leather comfort of booth 26, which was well-centered, enabling me to keep an eye on the door where patrons waited to be seated by the maître d’. If people waited too long, I hopped up and tried to help. If someone I knew came in the door, I walked over to say hello. If someone got to the dining room, looked around, and then turned and walked back out the door, I wanted to know why. What had turned them off? What could we have done differently to make them stay? I wanted to chase after them and ask questions, which would likely have spooked them away forever, remembering me as the stalker restaurateur.

I adhered to my code of survival: Get out of bed every morning, exercise, go forward, laugh, and try to get a dose of friends whenever possible. Friends made the difference between a horrible day and a wonderful one. Something as simple as an unexpected phone call to find out how I was doing, or an invitation to a dinner party, would lift my spirits considerably. Or, another moms’ dance party. Late-night phone calls from Paolo helped, too. He put such a big smile on my face. I loved the secret we shared, our clandestine teenage flirtation. My shrink said, “You’re like a virgin again,” to which I replied, “and in no hurry to lose her virginity.”

Nobody knows what to do with a widow, and it’s especially a challenge for married couples. My girlfriends were married and they might be able to come dancing on weeknights but weekends were husband and family time. In the first several months after Howard died, I was included as the third person or fifth or seventh at dinner, but in time there were fewer invitations, fewer phone calls. The calls always stopped altogether after six o’clock on Friday, not to resume until Monday morning at ten. Initially I thought this might be because I lived in Washington, a socially conservative community with old-school standards, more Eisenhower era than many would believe. But
when I talked to other widows—different ages from far and wide—I’d hear the same complaint. Some felt they’d become invisible after their husbands died.

Friends would bring up the question of dating, as in when I was planning to start, but I wasn’t the least bit interested. For one thing, I still felt quite married—only my husband was dead. With my harrowing schedule, it would have been nearly impossible to start a relationship from scratch. I couldn’t very well tell people about my flirtation with Paolo. For me, it was just enough real and just enough fantasy. It was like we were both married, but flirting. I didn’t have room for more. It would be something else entirely to come home to the same man every night with a rundown of my day. That would be the biggest downer—for him; it might have been a relief for me.