Page 62 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

accept him for who he really was. He had spent his childhood navigating the minefield of his father’s conditional acceptance, and he knew all too well that there was only one way to receive it—by being someone he wasn’t —and he would never be able to pull that off. His father’s approval still mattered more than anything else. Fred was, and always had been, the ultimate arbiter of his children’s worth (which is why, even late into her seventies, my aunt Maryanne continued to yearn for her long-dead father’s praise).
When TWA later offered Freddy the opportunity to fly out of Idlewild, he jumped at the chance, thinking it might be a way to salvage the situation. The move made no sense from a practical perspective, since he’d have to commute from Marblehead to New York every three or four days. Worse, it put him into closer proximity to Fred. But maybe for Freddy that was the point. Even if he couldn’t get Fred’s approval, it might be easier to convince his father that flying was what he should be doing if he could see it up close. In between flights, Freddy took fellow pilots back to the House to meet his family, hoping Fred might be impressed. It was a desperate move, but Freddy was desperate.
In the end, it made no difference. Fred could never get past the betrayal. Although Freddy had joined ROTC and a fraternity and the flying club, things his father would have disdained but probably didn’t know about, those activities hadn’t altered his plan to work for his father to ensure that the empire would survive in perpetuity. From Fred’s perspective, Freddy’s leaving Trump Management must have felt like an act of blatant disrespect. Ironically, it was the kind of boldness Fred had wanted to instill in his son, but it had been squandered on the wrong ambition. Instead, Fred felt that Freddy’s unprecedented move undermined his authority and diminished Fred’s sense that he was in control of everything, including the course of his son’s life.
A few weeks after the boys’ visit, a summer storm thundered over Marblehead Harbor. Linda was standing in the living room ironing Freddy’s white uniform shirts when the phone rang. As soon as she heard her husband’s voice, she knew something was wrong. He had quit his job at TWA, he told her. The three of them needed to move back to New York as