Page 143 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

My grandfather’s moods eventually evened out, and the problem for Gam became the repetition. After getting home from the office in the evening, he’d go upstairs to change, often coming back downstairs wearing a fresh dress shirt and tie but no pants, just his boxers, socks, and dress shoes. “So how is everybody? Okay? Okay. Good night, Toots,” he’d say, and head back upstairs, only to descend again a few minutes later.
One evening as Gam and I sat together in the library, my grandfather came in and asked, “Hey, Toots, what’s for dinner?”
After she answered, he walked out. A few moments later, he returned. “What’s for dinner?” She answered again. He left and returned ten, twelve, fifteen times. With decreasing amounts of patience, she told him “Roast beef and potatoes” every time.
Eventually she lashed out at him. “For God’s sake, Fred, stop it! I’ve already told you.”
“Okay, okay, Toots,” he said with a nervous laugh, hands raised against her as he bounced up on his toes. “Well, that’s that,” he said, tucking his thumbs under his suspenders, as though we had just finished a conversation. The gestures were the same as they’d always been, but the glint in his eyes had become dully benign.
He left the room, only to wander in a few minutes later to ask, “What’s for dinner?”
Gam pulled me onto the porch—an uninviting square of cement on the side of the House just off the library that decades earlier had been used for family barbecues. It had been so long neglected that I often forgot it existed.
“I swear, Mary,” she told me, “he’s going to drive me mad.” The chairs that had been left out there and long forgotten were so littered with twigs and dead leaves that we remained standing.
“You need to get help,” I said. “You should talk to someone.”
“I can’t leave him.” She was close to tears.
“I would have liked to go home again,” she once told me wistfully. I
didn’t understand why she couldn’t go back to Scotland, but she adamantly refused to do anything that might look selfish.
On weekends, if they weren’t at Mar-a-Lago, my grandparents would drive to one of their other children’s country homes: Robert’s in Millbrook, New York; Elizabeth’s in Southampton; or Maryanne’s in Sparta, New Jersey. They would plan to spend the night, and my grandmother would look forward to a quiet, relaxing weekend with other people. As soon as