Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 26
But the new toys weren’t just for recreation. Dad had a plan. After Steeplechase, he had been increasingly sidelined at Trump Management, so he came up with the idea of chartering both the boat and the plane to create another source of income. If it worked out, he might be able to free himself from Trump Management after all. He hired a full-time captain to run the boat charters, but on the weekends, when doing so would have been the most lucrative, he had the captain drive him and his friends around instead.
When Linda joined them on the boat, she noticed that Freddy always drank more than everybody else, just as he had in Marblehead, which spurred increasingly intense fights between them. The increasing frequency with which Freddy flew under the influence was alarming, and as the summer of 1967 proceeded, Linda became reluctant to get onto the plane with him. The unraveling continued. By September, Dad realized that his plan wasn’t going to work. He sold the boat, and when Fred found out about the plane, he got rid of that, too.
At twenty-nine years old, my father was running out of things to lose.
C
HAPTER
S
IX
A Zero-Sum Game
I woke up to the sound of Dad’s laughter. I had no sense of the time. My room was very dark, and the hallway light glared bright and incongruous under my door. I slipped out of bed. I was two and a half, and my five-year-old brother was sleeping far away on the opposite end of the apartment. I went alone to see what was going on.
My parents’ room was next to mine, and its door was standing wide open. All of the lights were on. I stopped at the threshold. Dad had his back to the chest of drawers, and Mom, sitting on the bed directly across from him, was leaning away, one hand held up, the other supporting her weight on the mattress. I didn’t immediately know what I was looking at. Dad was aiming a rifle at her, the .22 he kept on his boat to shoot sharks—and he kept laughing.
Mom begged him to stop. He raised the gun until it was pointing at her face. She lifted her left arm higher and screamed again, more loudly. Dad seemed to find it funny. I turned and ran back to bed.
My mother corralled my brother and me into the car and took us to a friend’s house for the night. Eventually my father tracked us down. He barely remembered what he’d done, but he promised my mother it would never happen again. He was waiting for us when we returned to the apartment the next day, and they agreed to try to work things out.
But they kept going through the motions of their day-to-day lives without acknowledging the problems in their marriage. Nothing was going to get better. Things weren’t even going to stay the same.
Less than two miles away, in another one of my grandfather’s buildings, Maryanne was in trouble. Her husband, David, had lost his Jaguar dealership a couple of years earlier and still didn’t have a job. Anybody who was paying attention would have realized that all was not well, but Maryanne’s siblings and their friends thought David Desmond was a joke—rotund and harmless. Freddy had never understood the marriage or taken his brother-in-law seriously.
Maryanne had been twenty-two when she had met David. A graduate student at Columbia studying public policy, she had planned to get a PhD, but, wanting to avoid the shame of being called an old maid by her family (Freddy included), she had accepted David’s proposal and dropped out of school after getting her master’s degree.
The initial problem was that David, a Catholic, insisted that Maryanne convert. Not wanting to provoke her father’s anger or hurt her mother’s feelings, she was terrified to ask for their blessing.
When she finally did, Fred said, “Do whatever you want to do.”
She explained how very, very sorry she was to disappoint them.
“Maryanne, I couldn’t care less. You’re going to be his wife.”
Gam didn’t say anything at all, and that was that.
David liked to tell Maryanne that his name would be known far beyond the reach of the Trumps. Although well educated, he didn’t have any obvious skills to back up his ambition. Even so, he remained convinced that he’d find a way to succeed beyond his dreams and “show them.” Like Ralph Kramden without the charm, kindness, or steady job with benefits, his “next big thing,” just like the car dealership, always failed or never materialized at all. It wasn’t long into the marriage before David started drinking.
The Desmonds lived rent free in a Trump apartment and enjoyed the same medical insurance everyone in the family received through Trump Management, but free rent and medical insurance didn’t put food on the table, and they had no income.
The biggest mystery, however, was why Maryanne was so financially dependent on her incompetent husband, just as it was a mystery that Elizabeth lived in a gloomy one-bedroom apartment next to the 59th Street Bridge and Freddy couldn’t buy a house and his planes, boats, and luxury cars kept disappearing. My grandfather and great-grandmother had set up trust funds for all of Fred’s children in the 1940s. Whether or not Maryanne was entitled to the principal yet, the trusts must have generated interest. But the three oldest children had been trained not to ask for anything ever, and if my grandfather was the trustee of those trusts, they were trapped in their financial circumstances. Asking for help meant you were weak or greedy or seeking advantage over someone who needed nothing from you in return, although an exception was made for Donald. It was so frowned upon that Maryanne, Freddy, and Elizabeth, in different ways, all suffered from totally avoidable deprivation.
After a few years of her husband’s continued unemployment, Maryanne was at the end of