Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 24
The entire spectacle was a disaster. Sentiment, nostalgia, and community were concepts my grandfather didn’t understand, but when those windows were broken, even he must have conceded to himself that he’d gone too far. Due to local rebellion against his project, he was unable to secure the zoning change he needed and was forced to back out of the Steeplechase development.
The venture exposed his waning ability to move the ball down the field. Fred’s power was largely derived from his connections. In the early to mid-1960s, there was a significant changing of the guard in New York City politics, and, as many of his old connections and cronies were losing their own power and places, Fred was being passed by. He would never again pursue an original construction project. Trump Village, completed in 1964, would be the last complex ever built by Trump Management.
Unable to accept responsibility, much as Donald would later be, Fred blamed Freddy for the failure of Steeplechase. Eventually, Freddy blamed himself.
It didn’t help that Donald drove back to the House from Philadelphia almost every weekend. It turned out that he wasn’t any more comfortable at Penn than he had been at Fordham. The work didn’t interest him, and it’s possible that he suddenly found himself a small fish in a big pond. In the 1960s, NYMA had been at the height of its enrollment—a little over five hundred students in grades eight through twelve—but Penn had several thousand when he attended. At the military academy, Donald had survived the first couple of years as an underclassman by using the considerable skills he’d acquired growing up in the family house: his ability to feign indifference in the face of pain and disappointment, to withstand the abuse of the bigger, older boys. He hadn’t been a great student, but he’d had a certain charm, a way of getting others to go along with him that, back then, wasn’t entirely grounded in cruelty. In high school Donald had been a decent athlete, a guy some people found attractive with his blue eyes and blond hair and his swagger. He had all the confidence of a bully who knows he’s always going to get what he wants and never has to fight for it. By the time he was a senior, he had enough cachet with his fellow students that they chose him to lead the NYMA contingent in the New York City Columbus Day Parade. He didn’t foresee any such success at Penn and saw no reason to spend any more time there than he had to. The prestige of the degree was what really mattered anyway.
During the most crucial juncture of the Steeplechase deal, its unraveling, and its aftermath, Donald did a fair amount of armchair quarterbacking. Freddy, who had never developed the armor that might have helped him withstand his father’s mockery and humiliation, was particularly sensitive to being dressed down in front of his siblings. When they were younger, Donald had been both a bystander and collateral damage. Now that he was older, he felt increasingly confident that Freddy’s continuing loss of their father’s esteem would be to his benefit, so he often watched silently or joined in.
My father and grandfather were conducting a Steeplechase postmortem in the breakfast room that, on Fred’s side, was acrimonious and accusatory and, on Freddy’s, was defensive and remorseful. Donald casually said to his brother, as though completely unaware of the effect his words would have, “Maybe you could have kept your head in the game if you didn’t fly out to Montauk every weekend.”
Freddy’s siblings knew that their father had always disapproved of what was now merely Freddy’s hobby. There was a tacit agreement that they wouldn’t talk about the planes or the boats in front of the Old Man. Fred’s reaction to Donald’s revelation proved the point when he said to Freddy, “Get rid of it.” The next week, the plane was gone.
Fred made Freddy miserable, but Freddy’s need for his father’s approval seemed to intensify after Marblehead and even more after the demise of Steeplechase. He’d do whatever his father told him to do in the hope of gaining his acceptance. Whether he realized it consciously or not, it would never be granted.
When they first moved into the Highlander, Freddy and Linda had been concerned that the other tenants would bother the landlord’s son with their complaints. Now they found themselves at the bottom of the list when they needed repairs.
The windows in my parents’ ninth-floor corner bedroom offered expansive southern and eastern views, but they were also vulnerable to strong gusts of wind. In addition, the Highlander had built-in air conditioners in every room that hadn’t been installed properly, so condensation accumulated between the drywall and outer bricks whenever the AC was running. Over time, the built-up moisture seeped into the drywall, softening it. By December, the wall around the unit in my parents’ bedroom had deteriorated so badly that a frigid draft constantly blew into the room. My mother tried to cover the wall around the air conditioner with plastic sheeting, but the arctic air continued to pour in. Even with the heat blasting, their bedroom was always bitterly cold. The superintendent at the Highlander never responded to their request to have a maintenance crew sent up, and the wall was never repaired.
New Year’s Eve 1967 was particularly inclement, but despite the rain and wind, my parents drove out east to celebrate with friends at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk. By