1969
The lights spread out below my window, keeping me tethered. I found them beautiful, sparkling to dispel any possibility of total darkness, glittering on the other side of the dividing line that ran through my neighborhood. Jamaica, where I lived with my mother, Linda, and brother, Fred C. Trump III (whom we called Fritz), was on the wrong side of the tracks from Jamaica Estates, the white, upper-middle-class neighborhood where my grandparents lived and my father, Fred Trump Jr., and his siblings, Maryanne, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert, had grown up.
But even Jamaica was segregated. My apartment building, the Highlander, stood at the top of the hill that formed the southern border of the part of town called Jamaica Hills (although I had no idea that’s what it was called). This part of the neighborhood, almost exclusively white, with its tree-lined streets and a park with towering oaks and a pond that reached all the way back toward Jamaica High School, felt almost suburban, at least to a kid who didn’t know what a suburb was. It stood in stark contrast to South Jamaica, which was predominately Black and urban.
My bed was almost flush against a wall with south-facing windows. We were only a few miles from John F. Kennedy International Airport, and large commercial planes flew past my window every few minutes. Not long before, my father, Freddy, a pilot for TWA, had sat in the cockpit of 707s, taking off on his way to places I hadn’t yet heard of. But I wouldn’t know any of that for decades. In 1969, I was four years old.
Diagonally across from where my head lay on the pillow, the moon rose every night. Its light tethered me, too; its steady presence helped me keep time. It kept me company on those nights when I couldn’t sleep, which, after Dad left for good, was often.
It had become easier for us since Dad moved back in with his parents, to the place we called the House. The tension in our own home faded. I no longer had to dodge the fights that often sparked between him and my mother—because of his drinking, mostly, but also because her anger about it caused them both to be cruel. Instead, I’d begun to learn how to walk on the eggshells of my mother’s quiet despair.
They had both fallen so far from the early, heady days of their relationship, when my father was about to take his place at Trump Management as his father’s right-hand man, and they spent evenings in the city with friends at the hottest clubs and weekends flying to Montauk or Bimini in Dad’s Piper Cherokee. By 1967, my father’s career and health had deteriorated; my mother was effectively trapped with two very young children in a run-down apartment that we rented from my grandfather and that she hated; and their marriage had disintegrated so thoroughly that it was almost impossible to imagine how these two wholly unsuited people had come together in the first place. My mother once told me that Freddy Trump was the most handsome man she’d ever met, and he could make her laugh. At twenty-two, that might have seemed enough. What my father saw in her was harder to discern, but she was pretty and admiring. Perhaps at twenty-three that was enough for him.
Now, seven years later, nearly thirty years old, my mother had no money beyond whatever was given to her for basic expenses and had no resources with which to make a new start. On top of this, her struggles with depression and her own futility were made worse by her inability to locate the reasons her life had unraveled so precipitously.