CHAPTER TWELVE

The Debacle

I sat there with the phone in my hand, not knowing what to do next. It was one of those moments that changes everything—both what came before and what will come after—and it was too big to process.

I called my brother, and as soon as I heard his voice, I burst into tears.

He called Gam to see if he could explain what we were really asking for, but they had basically the same conversation. Her parting shot to him was slightly different, though: “When your father died, he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. ” In the world of my family, that was the only thing that mattered. If your only currency is money, that’s the only lens through which you determine worth; somebody who has accomplished in that context as little as my father was worth nothing—even if he happened to be your son. Further, if my father died penniless, his children weren’t entitled to anything.

My grandfather had every right to change his will as he saw fit. My aunts and uncles had every right to follow his instructions to the letter, despite the fact that none of them deserved their share of Fred’s fortune any more than my father did. If not for an accident of birth, none of them would have been a multimillionaire. Prosecutors and federal judges don’t typically have $20 million cottages in Palm Beach. Executive assistants don’t have weekend homes in Southampton. (Although, to be fair, Maryanne and Elizabeth were the only two of the siblings, other than my father, to work outside of the family business. ) Still, they acted as if they had earned every penny of my grandfather’s wealth and that money was so tied up in their sense of self-worth that letting any of it go was not an option.

On Irwin’s advice we approached Jack Barnosky, a partner at Farrell Fritz, the largest law firm in Nassau County. Jack, a pompous, self-satisfied man, agreed to take us on as clients. His strategy was to prove that my grandfather’s 1990 will should be overturned: Fred Trump had not been of sound mind at the time the will was signed, and he had been under the undue influence of his children.

Less than a week after we served the executors, Jack received a letter from Lou Laurino, a short, wiry pit bull of a lawyer who was representing my grandfather’s estate. The medical insurance that had been provided to us by Trump Management since we were born had been revoked. Everyone in the Trump family was covered by it. My brother depended upon this insurance to pay for my nephew’s crushing medical expenses. When William had first fallen ill, Robert had promised Fritz that they would take care of everything; he should just send the bills to the office.

Taking away our insurance didn’t benefit them at all; it was merely a way to cause us more pain and make us more desperate. William was out of the hospital by then, but he was still susceptible to seizures, which more than once had put him in a state of cardiac arrest so severe that he would not have survived without CPR. He still required round-the-clock nursing care.

The family all knew this, but none of them objected, not even my grandmother, who was as aware as anybody that her own desperately ill great-grandchild would probably need expensive medical care for the rest of his life.

Fritz and I had no choice but to launch another lawsuit to make them reinstate William’s medical insurance. The suit required depositions and affidavits from the doctors and nurses responsible for William’s care. It was time consuming and stressful and culminated in an appearance in front of a judge.

Laurino defended the cancellation of the insurance by first claiming that we had no right to expect the insurance in perpetuity. It was, rather, a gift that had been bestowed upon us out of the goodness of my grandfather’s heart. He also downplayed William’s condition, insisting that the round-the-clock nurses who attended to William and had saved his life more than once were overpriced babysitters. If Fritz and Lisa were worried that their infant son might have another seizure, he said, they should just learn CPR.

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 ‘He said, she said. ’ Besides, your grandfather’s estate is only worth around thirty million dollars. ” That was only a tenth of the estimate Robert had given the New York Times in 1999, which itself would turn out to be only 25 percent of the estate’s actual value.

Fred no doubt believed that my dad had been given the same tools, the same advantages, and the same opportunities as Donald had. If Freddy had thrown them all away, that wasn’t his father’s fault. If, despite them, my dad had continued to be a terrible provider, my brother and I should consider ourselves lucky that there were trust funds our father couldn’t squander when he was alive. Whatever happened to us after that had nothing to do with Fred Trump. He had done his part; we had no right to expect more.

While the lawsuits were still in progress, I received word that, after a brief illness, Gam had died on August 7, 2000, at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, just as my grandfather had. She was eighty-eight.

If I had known she was sick, I think I would have tried to see her, but the fact that she hadn’t asked to see me clarified just how easy it had been for us to let each other go. We had never spoken after that last phone conversation, just as I had not spoken again to Robert, Donald, Maryanne, or Elizabeth. It had never occurred to me to try.

Fritz and I decided to attend Gam’s funeral, but, knowing we were unwelcome, we stood in one of the overflow rooms at the back of Marble Collegiate Church. Along with a couple of Donald’s security guards, we watched the service on a closed-circuit monitor.

The eulogies were remarkable only for what was not said. There was a lot of speculation about my grandparents’ reunion in Heaven, but my father, their oldest son, who had been dead for almost twenty-seven years, was not mentioned at all. He didn’t even appear in my grandmother’s obituary.

I received a copy of Gam’s will a few weeks after she died. It was a carbon copy of my grandfather’s, with one exception: my brother and I had been removed from the section outlining the bequests for her grandchildren. My father and his entire line had now been effectively erased.

⇐ Предыдущая 7 8 9 10 11 12 131415 16 Следующая ⇒