Page 148 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Only Currency
Fred Trump died on June 25, 1999. The following day, his obituary was published in the New York Times under the banner “Fred C. Trump, Postwar
Master Builder of Housing for Middle Class, Dies at 93.” The obituary writer made a point of contrasting Fred’s status as “a self-made man” with “his flamboyant son Donald.” My grandfather’s propensity for picking up unused nails at his construction sites to hand back to his carpenters the next day was noted before the details of his birth. The Times also repeated the family line that Donald had built his own business with minimal help from my grandfather—“a small amount of money”—a statement that the paper itself would refute twenty years later.
We sat in the library, each with our own copy of the Times. Robert was raked over the coals by his siblings for having told the Times that my grandfather’s estate was worth between $250 million and $300 million. “Never, never give them numbers,” Maryanne lectured him, as if he were a stupid kid. He stood there shamefaced, cracking his knuckles and bouncing on the balls of his feet, just as my grandfather used to do, as if suddenly imagining the ensuing tax bill. The valuation was absurdly low—eventually we would learn that the empire was probably worth four times that—but Maryanne and Donald would never have admitted that it was even that much.
Later we stood upstairs in the Madison Room at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the most exclusive and expensive bereavement services provider in the city, smiling and shaking hands as a seemingly endless line of visitors passed through.