Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 10
When Friedrich died of the Spanish flu, twelve-year-old Fred became the man of the house. Despite the size of her husband’s estate, Elizabeth found it difficult to make ends meet. The flu epidemic, which killed upward of 50 million people worldwide, had a destabilizing effect on what otherwise might have been a booming wartime economy. While still in high school, Fred took a series of odd jobs in order to help his mother financially and began to study the building trade. Becoming a builder had been his dream for as long as he could remember. He took every opportunity to learn the business, all aspects of which intrigued him, and during his sophomore year, with his mother’s backing, he began building and selling garages in his neighborhood. He realized he was good at it, and from then on he had no other interests—none. Two years after Fred’s high school graduation, Elizabeth created E. Trump and Son. She recognized her son’s aptitude, and the business, which enabled her to handle financial transactions for her underage middle child—in the early twentieth century, people didn’t attain legal majority until the age of twenty-one—was her way of supporting him. Both the business and the family thrived.
When Fred was twenty-five years old, he attended a dance where he met Mary Anne MacLeod, recently arrived from Scotland. According to family legend, when he returned home, he told his mother that he had met the girl he was going to marry.
Mary had been born the youngest of ten in 1912 in Tong, a village on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, located forty miles off the northwest coast of Scotland; her childhood had been bracketed by two global tragedies, the latter of which also deeply affected her future husband: World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic. Lewis had lost a disproportionate percentage of its male population during the war, and in a cruel twist of fate, two months after the armistice was signed in November 1918, a ship carrying soldiers home to the island from the mainland crashed into rocks just a few yards offshore in the early hours of January 1, 1919. More than 200 soldiers of the approximately 280 on board died in the brutally cold waters less than a mile from the safety of Stornoway Harbor. Much of the island’s young adult male population was lost. Any young woman hoping to find a husband would have better luck elsewhere.
Mary, one of six daughters, was encouraged to journey to America, where the opportunities were greater and the men more plentiful.
In early May 1930, in a classic example of “chain migration,” Mary boarded the RMS Transylvania in order to join two of her sisters who had already settled in the United States. Despite her status as a domestic servant, as a white Anglo-Saxon, Mary would have been allowed into the country even under her son’s draconian new immigration rules introduced nearly ninety years later. She turned eighteen the day before her arrival in New York and met Fred not long after.
Fred and Mary were married on a Saturday in January 1936. After a reception at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, they honeymooned in Atlantic City for one night. On Monday morning, Fred was back at his Brooklyn office.
The couple moved into their first house on Wareham Road, just down the street from the house on Devonshire Road that Fred had shared with his mother. In those early years, Mary was still in awe of her head-spinning change in fortune, both financial and social. Instead of being the live-in help, she had live-in help; instead of competing for limited resources, she was the woman of the house. With free time to volunteer and money with which to shop, she never looked back, which perhaps explains why she was quick to judge others who came from similar circumstances. She and Fred put together an entirely conventional life with strictly drawn roles for husband and wife. He ran his business, which kept him in Brooklyn ten, sometimes twelve hours a day, six days a week. She ran the house, but he ruled it—and, at least in the beginning, so did his mother. Elizabeth was an intimidating mother-in-law who, during the first few years of her son’s marriage, made sure that Mary understood who was really in charge: she wore white gloves when she visited, putting Mary on notice regarding the expectations she had for her daughter-in-law’s housekeeping, which must have felt like a not-so-subtle mockery of her recent employment.
Despite Elizabeth’s hazing, those early years were a time of great energy and possibility for Fred and Mary. Fred whistled his way down the stairs on his way to work, and when he returned home in the evening, he whistled his way up to his room, where he changed into a clean shirt before dinner.
Mary and Fred hadn’t discussed baby names, so when their first child, a daughter, was born, they named her Maryanne, combining Mary’s first and middle names. The couple’s first son was born a year and a half later, on October 14, 1938, and named after his father—with one small change: Fred, Sr.’s, middle name was Christ, his mother’s maiden name; his boy would be named Frederick Crist. Everybody except his father would call him Freddy.
It seems as though Fred mapped out his son’s future before he was even born. Although he would feel the burdens of the expectations placed upon him when he grew older, Freddy benefited early on from his status in a way Maryanne and the other children would not. After all, he had a special place in his father’s plans: he would be the means through which the Trump empire expanded and thrived in perpetuity.
Three and a half years passed before Mary gave birth to another