Page 105 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

The subtext was clear: Donald is important, and he’s doing important things; you’re not.
I don’t know how the situation got resolved, but Dad eventually pulled it off. I was going to have my party.
Most of my guests had arrived and I was standing with a small group of friends when Donald made his entrance. He walked over to us, and instead of saying hello, he spread his arms and said, “Isn’t this great?”
We all agreed that it was, indeed, great. I thanked him again for letting us use the hotel, then introduced him to everybody.
“So what’d you think of that lobby? Fantastic, right?”
“Fantastic,” I said. My friends nodded.
“Nobody else could have pulled this off. Just look at those windows.”
I worried that he might tell us how great the bathroom tiles were next,
but he saw my grandparents, shook my hand, kissed me on the cheek, said, “Have fun, Honeybunch,” and walked over to them. My dad was sitting a couple of tables away from them, by himself.
When I turned back to my friends, they were staring at me. “What the hell was that?” one of them asked.
In the summer of 1981, Maryanne drove my father to the Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead, New Jersey, about half an hour from the Bedminster property that Donald would later turn into a golf course. Dad went through the thirty- day program, but he did it reluctantly. At the end of his stay, Maryanne and her second husband, John Barry, picked him up and brought him back to the House, arguably the worst place he could be. When she checked on him the next day, Dad had already started drinking again.
Freddy had lost his home and family, his profession, much of his willpower, and most of his friends. Eventually his parents were the only people left to take care of him. And they resented it. In the end, Freddy’s very existence infuriated his father.
Fred’s treatment of my father had always served as an object lesson to his other children—a warning. In the end, though, the control became something much different. Fred wielded the complete power of the torturer, but he was ultimately as trapped in the circumstance of Freddy’s growing dependence due to his alcoholism and declining health as Freddy was tied to him. Fred had no imagination and no ability to see a way beyond the