Page 138 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

white shoes. It was the first time I’d ever seen my grandfather wearing something other than a suit. I’d never seen him look so uncomfortable and self-conscious before.
Soon he’d go from habitually misplacing things and forgetting a word or a conversation here and there to forgetting familiar faces. You could measure your worth in my grandfather’s eyes by how long he remembered you. I don’t know if he remembered Dad, because I never once heard him mention my father in the years after his death.
Maryanne made sure my cousin David, by then a clinical psychologist, accompanied my grandfather to all of his appointments for checkups and neurological exams in a concerted effort to cement him in my grandfather’s memory, but it didn’t take long before my grandfather simply referred to David as “the doctor.”
I was standing with Maryanne and my grandfather by the pool at Mar-a- Lago when he pointed to me and said to his daughter, “Isn’t she a nice lady?” A year or so had passed since he’d first given me the sobriquet.
“Yes, Dad,” Maryanne said. She smiled wearily.
He looked at her carefully and, almost as an afterthought, asked, “Who are you?”
Her eyes watered as if somebody had slapped her. “Dad,” she said gently, “it’s Maryanne.”
“Okay, Maryanne.” He smiled, but the name didn’t mean anything to him anymore.
He never forgot Donald.
Rob, who’d left his position as president of Trump’s Castle (of the infamous $3.15 million chip bailout) under a cloud, had sat in for my grandfather at Trump Management during his 1991 hospitalization and never left. It was a good gig for Robert. In addition to the millions of dollars a year he got simply by virtue of the fact that he was one of Fred’s living children, he was also paid half a million dollars a year to do a job that required little skill or effort. It was the position for which Freddy and then Donald had been groomed—and had rejected, each in his own way.
Fred still went to the office every day and sat behind his desk until it was time to go home, but Rob was actually, if not nominally, in charge of the well-oiled, self-sustaining machine he often referred to as a “cash cow.”