Page 75 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

Less than two miles away, in another one of my grandfather’s buildings, Maryanne was in trouble. Her husband, David, had lost his Jaguar dealership a couple of years earlier and still didn’t have a job. Anybody who was paying attention would have realized that all was not well, but Maryanne’s siblings and their friends thought David Desmond was a joke— rotund and harmless. Freddy had never understood the marriage or taken his brother-in-law seriously.
Maryanne had been twenty-two when she had met David. A graduate student at Columbia studying public policy, she had planned to get a PhD, but, wanting to avoid the shame of being called an old maid by her family (Freddy included), she had accepted David’s proposal and dropped out of school after getting her master’s degree.
The initial problem was that David, a Catholic, insisted that Maryanne convert. Not wanting to provoke her father’s anger or hurt her mother’s feelings, she was terrified to ask for their blessing.
When she finally did, Fred said, “Do whatever you want to do.” She explained how very, very sorry she was to disappoint them. “Maryanne, I couldn’t care less. You’re going to be his wife.” Gam didn’t say anything at all, and that was that.
David liked to tell Maryanne that his name would be known far beyond the reach of the Trumps. Although well educated, he didn’t have any obvious skills to back up his ambition. Even so, he remained convinced that he’d find a way to succeed beyond his dreams and “show them.” Like Ralph Kramden without the charm, kindness, or steady job with benefits, his “next big thing,” just like the car dealership, always failed or never materialized at all. It wasn’t long into the marriage before David started drinking.
The Desmonds lived rent free in a Trump apartment and enjoyed the same medical insurance everyone in the family received through Trump Management, but free rent and medical insurance didn’t put food on the table, and they had no income.
The biggest mystery, however, was why Maryanne was so financially dependent on her incompetent husband, just as it was a mystery that Elizabeth lived in a gloomy one-bedroom apartment next to the 59th Street Bridge and Freddy couldn’t buy a house and his planes, boats, and luxury cars kept disappearing. My grandfather and great-grandmother had set up