I sat on the couch with my foot elevated for four months. The fracture was so bad, the doctor said I would have been better off if I’d snapped the bone clean in two. The optimism I brought home with me from Tucson lasted a week; my resolve to hang on to what I’d achieved over the course of my eight weeks away lasted two.
And then I received a letter from Sue Craig, the investigative journalist from The New York Times who had first come to my house a few months earlier to see if I’d be willing to speak with her about my family’s financial history. I’d refused then, but in the interval, she’d written and called several times.
The horrors from the Trump administration continued, from Donald’s fascist comments in the wake of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally and the murder of Heather Heyer to the Department of Justice’s overturning of transgender workers’ rights, and on and on.
It was no longer clear what I was protecting by not talking to Sue Craig. The family line, as handed down by Maryanne, was that we don’t talk to reporters (except Donald, of course). But I wasn’t part of the family anymore. And nobody was doing anything to slow Donald down, let alone stop him.
Shortly after Maryanne and I had begun spending time together, I took a break, because every time we met, she brought up the lawsuit I had brought against my grandfather’s estate in 1999, which she referred to as “the debacle.” She made it clear that she considered herself the injured party and blamed me for ruining the last year of my grandmother’s life.
A year or two passed, but then she reached out to me again. I don’t know why, but something had shifted, and that’s when we started to become genuinely close. But every once in a while, she said something that reminded me of the bargain I was making.
She had told my brother, Fritz, that she planned to give us a gift—the interest on an annuity she had set up years earlier. It was a significant sum, and although I was grateful, I also saw it less as an act of generosity than as her attempt to return a small percentage of the inheritance she and her brothers had stolen from me.
The day had finally arrived. Maryanne answered the door wearing baggy shorts with an FDNY logo on the left leg and a PROPERTY OF THE US ARMY T-shirt that seemed so incongruous I almost laughed. I followed her into the living room and we took our seats by the windows overlooking Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With some ceremony she slid a thick envelope toward me. I thanked her, profusely. Stolen inheritance or not, she had no obligation to give me anything.
“My charity,” she said, “is almost always anonymous. I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to be able to see the impact it has on a recipient of it.”
I looked down at the floor, the smile frozen on my face.
I traded my crutches for a cane sometime in January, and, shortly after that, I met with Maryanne again. We didn’t go to the bistro anymore but spent my entire visit at her dining room table, which was almost completely covered with stacks of file folders and three-ring binders. On occasion she had a copy of Gwenda Blair’s book The Trumps nearby with Post-its of various colors sticking out between its pages. Usually at an hour in, regardless of what time I’d arrived, she asked if it was too early for a glass of wine. It turned out it never was.
By then I had handed forty thousand pages of documents over to the New York Times reporters and I had done my best, during phone calls and meetings at my house, to give them background information.
And I had learned a few things, too. I saw the copy of my parents’ divorce agreement, which essentially guaranteed my mother would never be able to get ahead financially; I read the transcripts of the depositions Maryanne, Donald, and Robert had given (Elizabeth wasn’t one of my trustees and hadn’t been one of my grandfather’s executors, either); and I listened to the recordings of them. Maryanne’s voice, in particular, dripped with contempt for us, but they were all devoid of any concern or love or affection for their dead brother or his children.
And I started to have some inkling of just how extraordinarily wealthy my grandfather had been and, in that context, just how mean his treatment of my father had been. I reread my grandparents’ wills, which were identical, and remembered the last thing Gam had ever said to me: “You know what your father was worth when he died? A whole lot of nothing.”