Page 157 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

The depositions did nothing to help us. I couldn’t believe what a terrible interlocutor Jack was. He failed to follow up and went off on tangents. Despite the fact that Fritz and I had prepared long lists of questions for him, he rarely, if ever, referred to them. Robert, much more detached than the last time I’d spoken to him, reiterated my grandfather’s hatred of my mother as his central justification for the disinheritance; Maryanne angrily referred to me and my brother as “absentee grandchildren.” I thought of all the times she had called the House when I was visiting my grandmother; now I understood why she’d never told my grandmother to say hi. My grandfather, she said, had been furious with us because we had never spent time with our grandmother, completely ignoring the history of the last decade. Apparently, my grandfather had also hated that Fritz never wore a tie and I, as a teenager, had dressed in baggy sweaters and jeans. When he was deposed, Donald didn’t know or couldn’t remember anything, a kind of strategic forgetfulness he has employed many times to evade blame or scrutiny. All three of them claimed in their sworn depositions that my grandfather had been “sharp as a tack” until just before he died.
During that time, my aunt Elizabeth ran into a family friend, who later relayed the exchange to my brother. “Can you believe what Fritz and Mary are doing?” she asked him. “All they care about is the money.” Of course wills are about money, but in a family that has only one currency, wills are also about love. I thought Liz might have understood that. She had no power. Her opinion about the situation wouldn’t have mattered to anybody but me and my brother, but it still hurt that she was toeing the party line. Even a silent, powerless ally would have been better than none at all.
After almost two years, with legal bills piling up and having made no progress on any kind of settlement, we had to decide whether to take our family to court. William’s condition remained serious, and a trial would have taken the kind of energy and focus my brother didn’t have. Reluctantly, we decided to settle.
Maryanne, Donald, and Robert refused to settle unless we agreed to let them buy our shares of the assets we’d inherited from our father—his 20 percent of the mini-empire and the “priceless” ground leases.
My aunts and uncles submitted a property valuation to Jack Barnosky, and, using their figures, he and Lou Laurino arrived at a settlement figure that was likely based on suspect numbers. Jack told us that, short of a trial, it was the best we could expect. “We know they’re lying,” he said, “but it’s