“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Your mother just left,” he said. “She should be home in a few minutes.” I could picture him in the poorly lit library standing next to the telephone table wearing his starched white shirt, red tie, and navy blue three-piece suit, impatient to be done with me.
“But what’s wrong?”
“Your father has been taken to the hospital, but it’s nothing to worry about,” he said as though reporting the weather.
I could have hung up then. I could have gone back to trying to fit in with my new classmates at my new school.
“Is it his heart?” It was unheard of for me—for anyone but Donald—to challenge my grandfather in any way, but there was obviously a reason I’d been told to call.
“Yes.”
“Then it’s serious.”
“Yes, I would say it’s serious.” There was a pause during which, perhaps, he was deciding whether to tell me the truth. “Go to sleep,” he said finally. “Call your mother in the morning.” He hung up.
I stood there in the stairwell with the phone in my hand, not knowing quite what to do. A door slammed on the floor above me. Footsteps followed, growing louder. A couple of students passed me on their way to the first floor. I put the receiver back into the cradle, picked it up, and tried my mother again.
This time she answered the phone.
“Mom, I just spoke to Grandpa. He told me Dad’s in the hospital, but he wouldn’t tell me what’s going on. Is he okay?”
“He had a heart attack,” my mother said.
From the moment she spoke, time took on a different quality. Or maybe it was the next moment, which I don’t remember, and the effect of the shock was retroactive. Either way, my mother kept talking but I didn’t hear any of the words she said. As far as I could tell, there was no gap in the conversation, but part of it never existed for me.
“He had a heart attack?” I said, echoing the last words I’d heard, as if I hadn’t missed something crucial.
“Oh, Mary, he’s dead.” My mother started to cry. “I really did love him once,” she said.
As my mother continued to speak, I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor of the landing. I dropped the phone, let it hang on its cord, and waited.
* * *
Sometime in the afternoon of Saturday, September 26, 1981, one of my grandparents called an ambulance. I didn’t know it then, but my father had been critically ill for three weeks. It was the first time anybody had called for medical help.
My grandmother had been a regular at Jamaica Hospital and Booth Memorial Hospital and Medical Center. My dad, too, had been admitted to Jamaica a few times. All of my grandparents’ children had been born there, so the family had a long-standing relationship with the staff and administration. My grandparents had donated millions of dollars to Jamaica in particular, and in 1975 the Trump Pavilion for Nursing and Rehabilitation had been named for my grandmother. As for Booth Memorial, my grandmother was heavily involved with the Salvation Army volunteers there—and it was also where I’d spent much of my childhood because of my severe asthma. A single phone call would have guaranteed the best treatment for their son at either facility. No call was made. The ambulance took my father to the Queens Hospital Center in Jamaica. No one went with him.
After the ambulance left, my grandparents called their other four children, but only Donald and Elizabeth could be reached. By the time they arrived in the late afternoon, the information coming from the hospital made it clear that my father’s situation was grave. Still nobody went.
Donald called my mother to let her know what was going on but kept getting a busy signal. He got in touch with our superintendent and told him to buzz her on the intercom.
Mom immediately called the House.
“The doctors think Freddy probably won’t make it, Linda,” Donald told her. My mother had had no idea that Dad was even sick.
“Would it be all right if I came to the House so I can be there if there’s any news?” She didn’t want to be alone.
When my mother arrived a short time later, my grandparents were sitting alone by the phone in the library; Donald and Elizabeth had gone to the movies.
While Mom sat with my grandparents, nobody said much. A couple of hours later, Donald and Elizabeth returned. When they were told there was no news, Donald left, and Elizabeth, nearing forty, made a cup of tea and went upstairs to her room. As my mother was getting ready to leave, the phone rang. It was the hospital. Dad had been pronounced dead at 9:20 p.m. He was forty-two.
Nobody thought to come get me from school, but arrangements were made for me to take a bus the next morning. Dunn drove me to the Greyhound station in Hartford, where I boarded a bus bound for the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. After picking me up in the city, my mother, brother, and I drove to the House, where the rest of the family was already gathered in the breakfast room to discuss the funeral arrangements. Maryanne and her son, my cousin David, were there; my uncle Robert and Blaine; and Donald, Ivana, almost eight months pregnant with Ivanka, and their three-year-old son, Donny. Nobody said much to my mother, brother, or me. There were some attempts at forced heartiness, mostly by Rob, but they didn’t land well and soon stopped. My grandfather and Maryanne spoke in hushed tones. My grandmother fretted about what she was going to wear to the wake; my grandfather had picked out a black pantsuit for her, and she wasn’t pleased.
In the afternoon, we drove over to R. Stutzmann & Son Funeral Home, a small place in Queens Village about ten minutes from the House, for a private viewing. Before going into the main room, where the coffin was already perched on its stand, I asked my uncle Robert if I could discuss something with him. I pulled him into a small alcove down the hall from the visitation room. “I want to see Dad’s body.” I saw no reason not to be direct. I didn’t have a lot of time.
“You can’t, Mary. It’s impossible.”
“Rob, it’s important.” It wasn’t for religious reasons or because I thought that was how things were done; I had never been to a funeral before and knew nothing about protocol. Although I knew I needed to see my father, I couldn’t articulate why. How could I say, “I don’t believe he’s dead. There’s no reason for me to believe that. I didn’t even know he was sick”? I could only say, “I need to see him.”
Rob paused and finally said, “No, Honeybunch. Your dad is being cremated, and his body hasn’t been prepared. It would be terrible for that to be the last memory you have of him.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I felt desperate in a way I didn’t understand. Rob looked down at me and then turned to leave. I stepped in front of him. “Please, Rob.”
He paused again, then began walking down the hall. “Come on,” he said. “We should go in.”
On Monday, in between the two sessions of the wake, the family went back to the House for lunch. On the way, Donald and Ivana had gone to the supermarket and picked up large quantities of prepackaged cold cuts that Maryanne and Elizabeth laid out on the breakfast room table and we ate or ignored in relative silence.
I had no appetite and wasn’t part of the conversation, so I left the breakfast room to wander around the house, as I’d used to do when I was younger. I walked to the back stairs across from the library doorway and caught a glimpse of Donald holding the telephone in his hand. I don’t know if he had just finished a call or was about to make one, but when he noticed me standing in the hallway, he returned the handset to the cradle. Neither one of us spoke. I hadn’t seen Donald since Mother’s Day, which we had celebrated at North Hills, my grandparents’ country club on Long Island. I didn’t expect tears from anybody except my grandmother, but Donald, and particularly my grandfather, seemed to be taking my dad’s death in stride. “Hey, Donald.”
“What’s up, Honeybunch?” I sometimes wondered if either of my uncles actually knew my name.
“Dad’s going to be cremated, right?” I had known for years that that was what Dad wanted. He had felt so str
ongly about not being buried that it was one of the first things he had told my mother after they were married. His insistence upon it bordered upon an obsession, which was why I had known about it before I turned ten.
“Right.”
“And then what? He’s not going to be buried, is he?”
A look of impatience crossed his face. It was clear he didn’t want to be having that conversation. “I think he is.”
“You know that makes no sense, right?”
“That’s what Dad wants.” He picked up the phone. When he noticed I wasn’t moving, he shrugged and started to dial.
I turned to climb the back stairway. On one end of the long second-floor hallway was Elizabeth’s corner room with Maryanne’s on the other side of their joint bathroom; on the other, Donald and Robert’s shared bedroom was outfitted with blue-and-gold bedspreads and matching window treatments. My grandparents’ much larger master bedroom stood right next to theirs and included Gam’s separate dressing room with mirrored walls. In the middle of the hallway was the Cell. Dad’s cot had been stripped, exposing the thin mattress. His portable radio was still on the small bedside table. The door to the closet was ajar, and I saw a couple of white button-down shirts hanging askew on wire hangers. Even on such a sunny day, the only window let in little light, and the room looked austere in the shadows. I thought I should go in, but there was nothing for me there. I went back downstairs.
The wake fell on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, but many of Dad’s fraternity brothers still came. His friend Stu, who had often attended dinner parties and charity events at Jamaica Hospital with his wife, Judy, probably knew my family better than any of Dad’s friends other than Billy Drake. Stu saw my grandfather standing alone in the back of the room, and he walked over to pay his respects. The two men shook hands and, after offering his condolences, Stu said, “It looks like real estate isn’t doing so well. I hope Donald’s okay. I see him in the news a lot, and it looks like he owes the banks a lot of money.”
Fred put his arm around his dead son’s friend and said with a smile, “Stuart, don’t worry about Donald. He’s going to be just fine.” Donald wasn’t there.
My brother gave the only eulogy (or, at least, the only one I remember), written on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, probably on the plane ride from Orlando, where he was a sophomore at Rollins College. He reminisced about the good times he and Dad had had together, most of which had occurred before I had been old enough to remember them, but he refused to shy away from the fundamental reality of my father’s life. At one point he referred to Dad as the black sheep of the family, and there were audible gasps from the guests. I felt a thrill of recognition and a sense of vindication—at long last. My brother, who had always been so much better at negotiating the family than I was, had dared tell the truth. I admired his honesty but also felt jealous that he seemed to have so many more good memories of my father than I did.
As the wake drew to a close, I watched as people began to line up, walk past the coffin, pause with eyes closed, hands clasped—sometimes kneeling on a low cushioned bench that seemed to have been put there for the purpose—and then move on.
When my aunt Elizabeth’s turn came, she began to sob uncontrollably. In the midst of all that stoicism, her display of emotion was jarring, and people looked at her with muted alarm. But no one approached her. She placed her hands on the coffin and slid to her knees. Her body was shaking so badly that she lost her balance and fell sideways to the floor. I watched her fall. She lay there as if she had no idea where she was or what she was doing and continued to cry. Donald and Robert finally came from the back of the room, where they’d been talking to my grandfather, who stayed where he was.
My uncles lifted Elizabeth from the floor. She limped between them as they pulled her from the room.
I approached the coffin eventually, tentatively. It seemed impossibly small, and I thought that there must have been a mistake. There was no way my father, at six feet two, could have fit inside that box. I ignored the bench and remained on my feet. I bowed my head, concentrating hard on one of the coffin’s brass fixtures. Nothing came to me.
“Hi, Dad,” I finally said under my breath. I wracked my brains as I stood there looking down, until it occurred to me that I might be standing at the wrong end of the coffin, that the conversation I was trying to have with my father was being directed at his feet. Mortified, I took a step back and returned to my friends.
There was no church ceremony. The coffin was transferred to the crematorium, and we met briefly in the chapel next door—oddly sun-drenched and bright—where a minister of no specified denomination demonstrated both his utter lack of knowledge of my father and the fact that nobody in the family had bothered to educate him about the man he was soon to consign to the flames.
When the business of the funeral was complete, the family planned to take a drive to the All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village where the family plot was; my grandfather’s parents, Friedrich and Elizabeth Trump, were the only occupants at the time. I later learned that over the preceding two days, my mother and my brother and I had separately pleaded with different members of the family to allow my father’s ashes to be spread over the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Before we left the chapel, I caught up with my grandfather to make one final plea. “Grandpa,” I said, “we can’t bury Dad’s ashes.”
“That’s not your decision to make.”
He started to walk away, but I grabbed his sleeve, knowing it would be my last chance. “Wasn’t it his?” I asked. “He wanted to be cremated because he didn’t want to be buried. Please, let us take his ashes out to Montauk.”
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized that I’d made a critical mistake. My grandfather realized it, too. He associated Montauk with my father’s frivolous hobbies, such as boating and fishing, activities that had distracted him from the serious business of real estate.
“Montauk,” he repeated, almost smiling. “That’s not going to happen. Get in the car.”
Sunlight glinted off the marble and granite grave markers as our grandfather, his light blue eyes squinting beneath his enormous eyebrows at the brightness of the day, explained that the tombstone, which was already inscribed with his mother’s and father’s names, would be removed temporarily so my father’s name and dates could be added. As he spoke, he spread his hands wide, like a used-car salesman, bouncing on the balls of his feet, almost jaunty, knowing he was in the presence of a rube.
My grandfather followed the letter of the law and then did what he wanted. After my father was cremated, they put his ashes into a metal box and buried them in the ground.
Dad’s death certificate, dated September 29, 1981, states that he died of natural causes. I don’t know how that is possible at forty-two. There was no will. If he had anything to leave—books, photographs, his old 78s, his ROTC and National Guard medals—I don’t know. My brother got Dad’s Timex. I didn’t get anything.
* * *
The House seemed to grow colder as I got older. The first Thanksgiving after Dad died, the House felt colder still.
After dinner, Rob walked over and put his hand on my shoulder. He pointed to my new cousin, Ivanka, asleep in her crib. “See, that’s how it works.” I understood the point he was trying to make, but it felt as though it was on the tip of his tongue to say, “Out with the old, in with the new.” At least he had tried. Fred and Donald didn’t act as if anything was different. Their son and brother was dead, but they discussed New York politics and deals and ugly women, just as they always had.
* * *
When Fritz and I were home for Christmas vacation, we met with Irwin Durben, one of my grandfather’s lawyers and, after Matthew Tosti died, my mother’s main contact, in order to go over the details of my father’s estate. I was shocked to find out that he had one. I thought he’d died virtually penniless. But apparently there were trust funds that had been set up by my grandfather and great-grandmother, such as th
e one that had paid for boarding school, that I didn’t know about at the time. They were to be split between me and my brother and kept in trust until we turned thirty. The people appointed to manage those trust funds and to protect our long-term financial interests were Irwin Durben, my aunt Maryanne, and my uncles Donald and Robert. Although Irwin was the point man—it was he we had to call or meet with if we had a question or a problem or any unforeseen financial needs—Donald was the ultimate arbiter of approval and the cosigner of all checks.
Stacks of documents covered Irwin’s desk. He sat in his chair behind them and began to explain what, exactly, we were about to sign. Before we got very far, Fritz interrupted him and said, “Mary and I talked about this earlier, and first we need to make sure that Mom will be taken care of.”
“Of course,” Irwin said. Then over the next two hours he methodically went through every piece of paper. The actual amount of money my father had left wasn’t clear to me. The trusts were complex financial arrangements (at least to a sixteen-year-old), and there was what seemed to be a huge tax burden. After explaining each document’s significance, Irwin pushed it across the desk for us to sign.
When he finished, he asked if we had any questions.
“No,” Fritz said.
I shook my head. I hadn’t understood a thing Irwin had said.
PART THREE Smoke and Mirrors
CHAPTER NINE The Art of the Bailout
“MARY TRUMP MUGGED” the New York tabloids, subtle as ever, blared in 100-point font the day after Halloween 1991. Even though I already knew what had happened, it was jarring to see the headlines as I passed news kiosks on my way to the subway.
Too Much and Never Enough Page 13