Page 95 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

Once Dad told us he had a job managing paperboys. I’d briefly had a paper route, and as far as I could tell that meant he was the guy who handed out the papers to the delivery kids from the trunk of his car, then collected the cash from them when they’d finished their routes. He told me once that he made $100 a day, which seemed like an enormous sum to me.
One evening, we were at the apartment having dinner with Dad’s girlfriend, Johanna. I preferred it when she wasn’t there; something about her was off-putting. She didn’t connect—or even try to—with me and Fritz. It was bad enough that she said things such as “Freddy, light me a fag,” considering she wasn’t British, but Dad started saying them, too.
We’d just finished eating when I started to recount the adventures I’d had with my mother at the bank that afternoon. While she had waited in the very long line, I had stood at one of the counters and filled out deposit slips with all sorts of aliases and wild sums of money I planned to withdraw in order to fund various schemes. I could barely contain how funny I thought the whole thing was. But as I told them about the secret identities, the secret withdrawals of cash, and my fiendish plots to disperse them, Dad got a wary look in his eyes.
“Does Mr. Tosti know about this?” he asked.
If I’d been paying closer attention, I might have known to stop, but I thought he was kidding, so I kept telling my story.
Dad got increasingly agitated, leaned forward, and pointed his finger at me. “What did you do?” As moody as my father could be, I’d rarely seen him so angry, and I’d almost never heard him raise his voice. I was confused and tried to retrace my narrative back to the point where he had started to think I’d done something wrong. But there was no such point, and my explanation about what had really happened only agitated him further.
“If Mr. Tosti finds out about this, I’m going to be in trouble with your grandfather.”
Johanna put her hand on Dad’s arm, as if to draw his attention away from me. “Freddy,” she said, “it’s nothing.”
“What do you mean ‘nothing’? This is really goddamn serious.”
I flinched at the curse word.
At that point both Johanna and I knew there was no talking him down.
He was drunk and trapped in some old narrative. I tried to explain it to him, to steady him, but he was too far gone. And I was only eight.