Free Innocent Spouse by Carol Ross Joynt Page A

couldn’t ask Howard why it had happened. I had an emotional twofer—hopeless
and
helpless. The level of despair outweighed the fear I had felt at the hospital, where at least the doctors and nurses answered my questions and were on my side. Who was I going to call? Who could I tell? Why would I want to reveal this awful turn of events? And it’s three in the morning. Not a good time to call anyone. The normal emotion might be anger. But no, I wasn’t there yet. I was still in the stages of shock and denial.
    At Nathans, once the floodgates were open, bad news began to cascade. A man arrived in the basement office who said he was the bookkeeper and there to take care of the quarterly tax payments for unemployment and other city and federal obligations. I welcomed him to do whatever it was he was there to do. When he was done, he asked to talk to me. Privately.
    Upstairs in the bar, for the better part of an hour, we talked about what people had started to call my “situation.” The bar business, I discovered, is as gossipy as the news business, and word had begun to spread about Howard’s fraud and the mess he had left behind. None of the gossips knew details, but that didn’t stop the grapevine from growing and expanding like kudzu. The bookkeeper had factual knowledgeof the business, though, and talked about the different ways Howard wrote checks out of Nathans and what he wrote off or didn’t. He added that essentially Howard had run the business “in his head.”
    I told him I had found a binder with daily numbers in it and comparisons to the year before. “It looks like a daily account of money earned or spent or both. To me, mostly a lot of numbers.”
    “That’s your book,” he said. “I’m sure there are two sets of books. If you can find the other, try to figure out which one is real.”
    Figure out which one is real? How was I going to do that? I knew the bookkeeper wanted to help, but the more he explained the more my mind began to slide into the fear zone. I wished I could dig deep into the crisis and hit the bottom, but there was no bottom. Digging deep meant only having to dig deeper.
    “Well, I’m going to bill you, but Howard always gave me a periodic $5,000.” That snapped me back to attention. I’m sure my jaw dropped.
    “Can I afford that?” I asked.
    “I don’t know if you can,” he said, adding, “He also let me run a tab.” All I could do was mumble, “Let me talk to the manager and get back to you.”
    I didn’t immediately find the Nathans “book” but I found Howard’s personal checkbook. In all our twenty years together I’d never looked in his checkbook. He had his, I had mine. He balanced both. He liked doing that. The book was big, brown, and covered in leather. I took a deep breath before lifting the cover. I flipped through the pages going back a year or so. Most of the entries were conventional, normal. But there were also entries for a few men I knew to be, well, characters around town. I didn’t know them personally, but Howard would mention them—with a salty anecdote and a groan—from time to time. One or the other was always down on his luck, in need of a loan. “But are you actually going to give him money?” I would ask, incredulous. “No fucking way,” he’d say. But now I noticed he’d written them checks. Not one, not two, but several. Five thousand here, three thousand there. I was certain they were loans rather than gifts. I wondered if they would offer to repay me, but they never did.
    I welcomed the company of friends and took advantage of every opportunity to be with them. In the early months after Howard’s death they were my core support. They included Howard’s only sibling, hissister, Martha, a presidency scholar, who had the advantage of being available almost on the spot. Her husband, Vijay Kumar, lived full-time at their home in New Castle, Delaware. Martha, who was camped at the White House and taught one night a week, commuted