My grandfather had a fabricated family crest and Latin motto inscribed on the pediment. Nobody knew what the motto stood for, although my father suggested it might be “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
It was disappointing having to put off their travel plans, but Linda took the pregnancy in stride. She had grown up believing this was the way it was supposed to be: work, get married, have kids right away, buy a house—and in the early 1960s that was the way things were for most women, by choice, expectation, or lack of opportunity. But the idea of being a dad so soon unnerved Freddy, who was still only twenty-three. They made the most of their last summer before their first child, a son, was born. Their socializing came to include black-tie fundraisers to benefit Jamaica Hospital, his mother’s favorite charity and a place she spent an inordinate amount of time as a patient, originally because of serious complications after her last pregnancy and then because of fractures caused by severe osteoporosis. Mostly, though, Freddy, Linda, and their friends spent glittering evenings at Manhattan clubs and dined at trendy restaurants like La Vie en Rose on Little Neck Parkway.
Freddy had trouble understanding what his father expected of him—not because he didn’t have the capacity for understanding, but because the expectations were either ambiguous, self-contradictory, or ridiculous. Why did he have to be a killer? Why did he have to treat their tenants like dirt? Why, in a company that ran like a well-oiled machine, did this enormously wealthy man feel it necessary to recycle nails he picked up at his building sites? But Fred Trump couldn’t stand waste. Fred Trump couldn’t stand feeling like he was being taken advantage of. And, it turned out, Fred Trump couldn’t stand delegating responsibility—especially to somebody he considered his inferior, which, increasingly, is how he thought of his oldest son.
My parents didn’t have a formal separation agreement until 1970, so for the first couple of years after they split up, Dad came to the Highlander on the weekends when he was able to. This schedule worked for him. I think being on his own was a relief. Being a part-time father suited him: he could have fun with us without the burden of too much responsibility and for a strictly limited amount of time. Sometimes we stayed in the apartment, but only if my mother wasn’t home—she had a hard time being in the same room with him. On warm days we walked down to South Jamaica, Dad carrying me on his shoulders and my brother trying to keep up with Dad’s long, easy stride. If there was a good movie playing, we went to the Loews theater on Jamaica Avenue, an ornate 1920s movie palace festooned with decorative pilasters and finials and cherubs. By the late sixties it had seen better days, but it still retained some of its classical grandeur. I was in awe of the gilt-edged seats, sweeping balcony, and massive red velvet curtains; it might have been sacrilegious to watch a movie like Jerry Lewis’s Hook, Line & Sinker in such a place. But I loved being there, especially on hot, cloudy days, when the three of us could sit in the cool dark air together and alone at the same time. And maybe Dad, for a couple of hours at least, could lose himself. He also usually swung by to pick us up one night a week.
By the end of 1964 he was back at Trump Management working for Fred again. This time it was clear he had no future there. His father had never respected him; after the betrayal of leaving Trump Management, Fred would never trust his namesake again.
Sometimes we went to the House, but it was better—easier, less fraught—when he took us to Dante’s, a little Italian place not too far from the Highlander on one of the quieter sections of Union Turnpike. There was a sameness about those dinners that comforted me—we ordered spaghetti and meatballs, and Fritz and I fought over the jukebox. Not over the songs we played, which were always the same—“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” “Cracklin’ Rosie,” and “Sweet Caroline”—but over who got to put the coins in the slot and who got to push the buttons. Since we were going to keep picking the same songs to play again and again, it didn’t matter. “Take turns,” Dad said, sliding us some more change across the heavily varnished wood table.
If my mother and father hadn’t yet figured out a way to be in the same room without getting into a fight, my father and grandfather had figured out that there would be no salvaging their relationship at all. My grandfather had won, and Dad couldn’t move on. But there was still tension between them, which I could feel, even if I didn’t understand it, whenever we went to the House. After a dinner that we’d eaten in the breakfast room, we moved to the dimly lit library, a room with no books, in which the family spent the most time. Dad sat with my grandmother on the love seat by the bay window, and I stood next to my grandfather’s knee while he taught me and my brother how to spell words like “arithmetic” and “Mississippi” backward and forward, or add long columns of four- or five-digit numbers that he wrote on a white pad of cheap scratch paper with one of his blue Flair markers. By the time he finished writing the numbers down, he had already solved the problem in his head. Like magic.
Writing a memoir certainly brings back memories that are both joyful and painful. But in the Trump family, one never knows what will be learned... In reading this book, though, the only thing about Donald Trump that really struck me, was that when they were very young and the children were at The House, and playing outside, it was Donald who would be the "bully" who threw balls at the boys in his family that were meant to hurt, sting when they were caught... Nobody ever attempted to change that activity...
But I was most struck by Mary's personal story that is woven into and out of the family into which she was born. It is a story that touched my heart as I envisioned her; while, at the same time, comparing her life within a wealthy family to mine within a low-income but loving Christian family... Mary, whose picture is on the front cover of her book, cannot have been more revealing by the title, Who Could Ever Love You. After judging her brother's recent book as the saddest book I'd ever read, I found a different response to Mary's. Her personal early life was quite different from her brother, who spent much more time at The House and only began to question his uncle's actions later in his life. Mary, younger, had to deal with more personal aspects of life when she was still very young.
What strikes me most is that Mary was away from her parents through one way or another--school, camps, and later college. Mary was reading at the age of three, obviously very intelligent. Once her parents were separated, her mother began to make friends with other neighborhood women, often leaving Mary with a family who cared for her; i.e., until an older boy in the family decided to explore Mary until his mother walked in... That stopped that close family relationship that she had enjoyed so much.
Although it never was explained or confirmed, Mary's mother actually was abusing her daughter, Mary. When young, she began to have signs of Asthma. It would get very bad at night, in bed, so much so that she could hardly breathe. She quickly went to her mother, waking her to tell her what was happening. Her mother barely woke up, saying, she could climb into bed with her. In the morning her mother would see what the problem was and took her to the hospital... Thing is, that same scenario kept happening. By the time Mary got to the hospital, she was barely breathing. At one point Mary describes what one of the doctors in the emergency room said to her mother. In my opinion, she needed to say that she began to feel like nobody could love her, especially her mother who, of course, was depressed by, first, her husband's family ignoring her and then that her husband began drinking so much that she couldn't deal with living with him... Mary stopped short of actually accusing her mother for her near-death experiences when she was young, but surely we all realize what was happening. Was her mother taking sleeping pills or something stronger that prevented her from immediately attending to Mary? I found this an excuse for the first time it happened, but not for the later times...
Mary's father, Fred Trump II, was a man who through his early life with lots of available money, had learned how to fly and loved being outside in the air or on the sea. Life seemed to be one big exploration of the life of the rich and famous. The thing is that Fred's love of flying or fishing led to his desire to become a pilot. His father called being a pilot a flying taxi or bus driver... Fred and Linda had been enjoying living high and being free to fly this place or that... and when his father made it clear that he expected Fred to take over the business one day, they slowly began to separate until, when married, his father was so openly prejudiced against his son's choice of a career--and a wife... that the loss of family and a lifestyle dependent upon his father slowly led to Mary's father turning to drinking to keep going. And ignoring his wife also moved to a total separation of the family structure that was ruled by Fred Trump.
1969 The lights spread out below my window, keeping me tethered. I found them beautiful, sparkling to dispel any possibility of total darkness, glittering on the other side of the dividing line that ran through my neighborhood. Jamaica, where I lived with my mother, Linda, and brother, Fred C. Trump III (whom we called Fritz), was on the wrong side of the tracks from Jamaica Estates, the white, upper-middle-class neighborhood where my grandparents lived and my father, Fred Trump Jr., and his siblings, Maryanne, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert, had grown up. But even Jamaica was segregated. My apartment building, the Highlander, stood at the top of the hill that formed the southern border of the part of town called Jamaica Hills (although I had no idea that’s what it was called). This part of the neighborhood, almost exclusively white, with its tree-lined streets and a park with towering oaks and a pond that reached all the way back toward Jamaica High School, felt almost suburban, at least to a kid who didn’t know what a suburb was. It stood in stark contrast to South Jamaica, which was predominately Black and urban. My bed was almost flush against a wall with south-facing windows. We were only a few miles from John F. Kennedy International Airport, and large commercial planes flew past my window every few minutes. Not long before, my father, Freddy, a pilot for TWA, had sat in the cockpit of 707s, taking off on his way to places I hadn’t yet heard of. But I wouldn’t know any of that for decades. In 1969, I was four years old. Diagonally across from where my head lay on the pillow, the moon rose every night. Its light tethered me, too; its steady presence helped me keep time. It kept me company on those nights when I couldn’t sleep, which, after Dad left for good, was often. It had become easier for us since Dad moved back in with his parents, to the place we called the House. The tension in our own home faded. I no longer had to dodge the fights that often sparked between him and my mother—because of his drinking, mostly, but also because her anger about it caused them both to be cruel. Instead, I’d begun to learn how to walk on the eggshells of my mother’s quiet despair. They had both fallen so far from the early, heady days of their relationship, when my father was about to take his place at Trump Management as his father’s right-hand man, and they spent evenings in the city with friends at the hottest clubs and weekends flying to Montauk or Bimini in Dad’s Piper Cherokee. By 1967, my father’s career and health had deteriorated; my mother was effectively trapped with two very young children in a run-down apartment that we rented from my grandfather and that she hated; and their marriage had disintegrated so thoroughly that it was almost impossible to imagine how these two wholly unsuited people had come together in the first place. My mother once told me that Freddy Trump was the most handsome man she’d ever met, and he could make her laugh. At twenty-two, that might have seemed enough. What my father saw in her was harder to discern, but she was pretty and admiring. Perhaps at twenty-three that was enough for him. Now, seven years later, nearly thirty years old, my mother had no money beyond whatever was given to her for basic expenses and had no resources with which to make a new start. On top of this, her struggles with depression and her own futility were made worse by her inability to locate the reasons her life had unraveled so precipitously.
Liz had a cassette player and cassettes—hers was the only room in the House with music. When I was nine, she added Neil Diamond’s His 12 Greatest Hits to her collection. I knew his music from the radio and the jukebox at Dante’s, the Italian restaurant we went to with Dad a couple of times a month, but those were only a handful of singles. I’d never heard “Shilo” or “Brooklyn Roads” before, and I began to wish Liz wouldn’t be at the House when I came by so I could listen to the tape, flipping the cassette back to the A-side when “Brooklyn Roads” ended, until it was time to leave. If she was around, I had to find somewhere else to go. Even if she was downstairs with Gam and Maryanne, I wouldn’t have dared go to her room. It never occurred to me to ask if I could hang out in her room with her, just as it never occurred to her to invite me in, let me sit next to her on the floor sharing her popcorn, flipping through magazines, and listening to music. I eventually stole the cassette from her. I knew it was wrong, but I wanted to be able to listen to it all the time. I could have asked my mother to buy it for me, or I could have used my allowance to buy it for myself, but neither of those things occurred to me, either.
When he saw the records on the floor by the front door, he gave a whoop. He dropped down on one knee and started flipping through them, calling out names of songs he knew with the excitement of a child. We were going back with him to Sunnyside and he asked my mother if he could take the records. She said yes—which was generally the average length of their interactions back then—and when Dad bent to pick the box up, I looked at him skeptically. But he rolled up his sleeve and flexed his bicep. I squeezed it with both hands, and he lifted me up until both of my feet floated above the ground. He lifted the box as if it weighed nothing, hoisted it on his shoulder, and carried it all the way to the car. When we got back to Sunnyside, we spent the entire day listening to song after song. The box contained everything from Benny Goodman to “Yes, We Have No Bananas” to Orson Bean’s “I Ate the Baloney” and the truly bizarre “The Great Crepitation Contest of 1946—The Battle at Thunderblow, Windesmear vs. Boomer.”
God Bless Us All
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