Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 59
After the first course had been served, I decided to find Maryanne. As I wound my way through the tables, Donald took to the stage to give his toast. If I hadn’t known who he was talking about, I would have thought he was toasting his secretary’s daughter.
I spotted Maryanne and paused. Fritz and I would not have been invited to Ivanka’s wedding without Maryanne’s approval. She didn’t see me until I was standing right in front of her.
“Hi, Aunt Maryanne.”
It took her a few seconds to realize who I was. “Mary.” She didn’t smile. “How are you?” she asked, her expression rigid.
“Everything’s great. My daughter just turned eight, and—”
“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
Of course she didn’t know I had a daughter or that I was raising her with the woman I’d married after my grandfather’s funeral and then divorced or that I had recently received my doctorate in clinical psychology. But she acted as if her lack of such knowledge was an insult to her. The rest of our brief conversation was equally tense. She mentioned that Ivana had missed Ivanka’s wedding shower but said, sotto voce, that she couldn’t discuss why.
I retreated to my table, and when I realized the vegetarian meal I’d ordered had not arrived, I ordered a martini in its stead. The olives would suffice.
Sometime later, I saw Maryanne, looking determined, head toward us as if on a mission. She walked straight up to my brother and said, “We need to talk about the elephant in the room.” Then, gesturing to include me, “The three of us.”
A few weeks after Ivanka and Jared’s wedding, Fritz and I met with Maryanne and Robert at her apartment on the Upper East Side. It wasn’t clear to me why Rob was there, but I thought perhaps he planned to make good on his claim that the “statute of limitations” on family estrangement had passed. I took it as a good sign, but as the afternoon wore on, I became less sure. We didn’t discuss anything that seemed pertinent. As we sat in the living room with its spectacular view of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maryanne made passing references to “the debacle,” as she called the lawsuit, but nobody else seemed eager to go down that road.
Rob leaned forward in his chair, and I hoped finally we were going to start dealing with the so-called elephant in the room. Instead he told a story.
Ten years earlier, Rob had still been working for Donald in Atlantic City when Donald’s financial situation was dire. His investors were getting hammered, the banks were after him, and his personal life was in shambles. When things were at their worst, Donald had called Rob with a request.
“Listen, Rob, I don’t know how this is all going to end,” he had said. “But it’s tough, and I might drop dead of a heart attack. If anything happens to me, I want you to make sure Marla will be okay.”
“Sure, Donald. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“Get her ten million dollars.”
I thought, Holy shit, that’s a lot of money! at the same moment that Rob said, “What a cheap bastard.”
Rob laughed at the memory as I sat there stunned, wondering how much money those people had. Last I’d heard, $10 million would have been one-third of my grandfather’s entire estate.
“Around the same time, Donald called to tell me I was one of his three favorite people,” Maryanne said. “Apparently he forgot he had three children.” (Tiffany and Barron were still to come.)
We never met with Rob again, but Fritz and I, separately and together, had lunch occasionally with Maryanne. For the first time in my life, I got to know my aunt. Not since I’d spent time with Donald while I was writing his book had I felt a little bit as though I were part of the family.
A couple of months after my aunts’ April 2017 birthday party, I was in my living room lacing up my sneakers when the front doorbell rang. I don’t know why I answered it. I almost never did. Seventy-five percent of the time it was a Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon missionaries. The rest of the time, it was somebody wanting me to sign a petition.
When I opened the door, the only thing that registered was that the woman standing there, with her shock of curly blond hair and dark-rimmed glasses, was someone I didn’t know. Her khakis, button-down shirt, and messenger bag placed her out of Rockville Centre.
“Hi. My name is Susanne Craig. I’m a reporter for the New York Times.”
Journalists had stopped contacting me a long time before. With the exception of David Corn from Mother Jones and somebody from Frontline, the only other person to leave a message before the election had been from Inside Edition. Nothing I had to say about my uncle would have mattered before November 2016; why would anybody want to hear from me now?
The futility of it annoyed me, so I said, “It is so not cool that you’re showing up at my house.”
“I understand. I’m sorry. But we’re working on a very important story about your family’s finances, and we think you could really help us.”
“I can’t talk to you.”
“At least take my card. If you change your mind, you can call me anytime.”
“I don’t talk to reporters,” I said. I took her card anyway.
A few weeks later, I fractured the fifth metatarsal of my left foot. For the next four months, I was a prisoner in my home, my foot elevated at all times as I sat on the couch.
I received a letter from Susanne Craig reiterating her belief that I