Donna Tartt, The Secret History, and Trusts

I've loved Donna Tartt's writing ever since I read this passage early in her 2002 novel The Little Friend. It introduces us to two sisters named Allison and Harriet Cleve (Harriet is the novel's main character):

Allison spent a lot of time with her great-aunts, on the weekends and after school.... What a good little cook, the aunts all sang. How pretty you are. You're an angel to come see us. What a good girl. How pretty. How sweet.
-----

Harriet, the baby, was neither pretty nor sweet. Harriet was smart.

From the time she was old enough to talk, Harriet had been a slightly distressing presence in the Cleve household. Fierce on the playground, rude to company, she argued with Edie [her grandmother] and checked out library books about Genghis Khan and gave her mother headaches. She was twelve years old and in the seventh grade....

This past week, laid up with sinus problems, I finally made my way through Ms. Tartt's first novel, The Secret History. I liked it almost as much as I liked The Little Friend. Both books are "thrillers," of a sort, although they take place in different worlds. The Little Friend takes place in Alexandria, Mississippi, while The Secret History is set at a fictional private college in Vermont. The Secret History is the story of six friends and classics scholars. Here, one of the six (Henry) is telling our narrator (Richard) about another of the six (Francis). And, interestingly enough (to me, at least), trusts play a part in the story:

[Francis] and his mother live off the income of a trust, as I expect you know, but they also have the right to withdraw as much as three percent of the principal per year, which would amount to a sum of about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Generally this isn't touched when it turns up, but in theory either of them can take it out whenever they like. A law firm in Boston serves as the trustees.... Francis had assured me that getting the money was a simple matter of going downtown and signing some papers....
But he wasn't back when he said he would be, and three hours passed, then four.... [Then] Francis burst in, half-hysterical. The money for that year was all gone, you see. His mother had checked out every cent of the principal at the first of the year and hadn't told him about it. It was a nasty surprise, but even nastier given the circumstances. [And, indeed, the circumstances are very nasty. -Joel] He'd tried everything he could think of -- to borrow money on the trust itself, even to assign his interests, which is, if you know anything about trusts, about the most desperate thing one can do....

While trusts that allow the beneficiary to withdraw principal are fairly common, I've never seen a trust with multiple beneficiaries that allowed any one of the beneficiaries to withdraw the entire principal. You can see the reason for that, as you get a race to the trustee to request the money (and what happens if both beneficiaries ask at the same time -- who wins?).