Dad traded the Piper Cherokee for a Cessna and bought a Chrisovich, a thirty-foot boat with a tuna tower, which he could drive much farther offshore for the kind of deep-sea fishing—for tuna and swordfish—he preferred. He often skirted the United States’ sovereign maritime zone, twelve miles out, where he and Linda and whatever friends were with them saw sea turtles and whales. Once a humpback breached so close to them that Freddy, usually unflappable, gunned the engine because, as he later told Linda, he was terrified the whale might capsize the boat.
During another trip with Billy and Annamaria, they spotted a Soviet naval vessel. Stone-faced sailors lined the railing, probably not knowing what to make of the skinny blond guy driving the boat, the other one sitting in the fishing seat with a beer, and the two beautiful bikini-clad women standing on the tuna tower smiling and waving at them.
Only a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was intensifying, and the smart thing to do would have been to reverse direction quietly. But egged on by Billy, Freddy buzzed the vessel while Annamaria shouted, “Do svidaniya!” at the sailors, who, luckily for the four Americans, ignored them.
Linda was still lonely during the week, but now that Fritz and I were a little older, there was more she could do with us. My parents had also become friendly with their next-door neighbors, Ricky and Gail Schneider. Like most of the husbands, Ricky, a neurosurgeon, only came out on the weekends, so Gail, whose kids were teenagers, also had a lot of time on her hands.
She confided to Linda that Ricky had a drinking problem. Linda, relieved to have somebody to confide in, unburdened herself to Gail, who knew that Freddy was struggling and the marriage was in trouble. Gail was older, so even though she and Ricky continued to face similar difficulties, she had more experience and was better able to take things in stride. To the extent it was possible, she helped Linda negotiate the land mines put in her path by marriage to an alcoholic who seemed to have no support.
Dad still lived for the weekends, but as the summer wore on it became harder for him to unwind after he landed the plane at the Montauk airport. When it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, Fred and Mary Trump decided to visit. Freddy suspected his father was only coming to check up on him.
Freddy spent the entire time worrying that Fred was going to find out that he’d bought another, more expensive plane and another, much more expensive boat. Linda worried her in-laws would discover how bad Freddy’s drinking had gotten. In typical Trump style, however, my grandparents left as soon as the lunch my mother prepared for them was over. They had no interest in seeing the town or going near the water. Freddy and Linda’s secrets were safe, at least for the time being, and the release of tension as soon as the limo pulled out of the dirt driveway onto the main street was palpable. Freddy slumped into a chair on the porch and, in a concession to how stressful the visit had been, Linda went into the kitchen and fixed them both a drink.
That moment of camaraderie wouldn’t last. When they returned to Jamaica after Labor Day, my mother promised herself she would not be going back to Montauk. Dad, on the other hand, was determined to get back to Montauk the next year. But there wasn’t going to be a next year.
My father’s parents had never approved of Linda. Because of her working-class upbringing and, perhaps, their low opinion of Freddy, they assumed from the start that she was a gold digger who glommed on to the first rich man she met. Given my grandmother’s own upbringing as the tenth child of a crofter on a tiny island forty miles off the west coast of Scotland who worked as a domestic servant when she first arrived in New York, the double standard was a bit much.
But it didn’t matter. In the end, they would fail each other in very specific ways: he couldn’t take care of her, and she couldn’t set him free. They both ended up trapped in ways that neither of them could have imagined.
A few months later, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my father’s laughter. I slid out of bed, the moon so bright outside my window that I had no trouble finding my way to the door. I stood on my tiptoes to reach the doorknob, and just as I slid through the doorway and stepped up to the threshold of my parents’ bedroom, my mother started screaming.
My father, who had backed himself against the double chest of drawers, was pointing a rifle at my mother and threatening to blow her head off. She sat on the bed, leaning as far away from him as she could, her hand held up in front of her face.
He was out of his mind with drunkenness, and the laughter injected a note of perversity that I think terrorized my mother as much as the presence of the gun.
Neither of my parents saw me, and before they could, I ran back to my room and hopped in bed as if nothing had happened at all. The experience jolted me into time and memory; it still hums with a mild current, alive, unprocessed and intact.
Before this, there had been only impressions—my cheek pressed against my mother’s tanned shoulder, warm from the sun, and the intoxicating smell of chlorine and Coppertone as she swam through the cool water with me on her back, arms clasped around her; the rough stubble of my father’s cheek and the dark smell of tobacco, the sharp scent of alcohol that clung to him. These isolated islands of sensation—inchoate, beyond language—carried no weight, free from the burden of meaning. But, not yet three, I was sensitive to the ways in which the people around me orbited each other, clashed with each other, and sometimes disappeared, leaving only the echoes of their instabilities.